Perhaps for a minute they awaited the desired summons, hammering their
feet on the frozen turf, hugging themselves with their pocketed hands
for a little warmth. It seemed impossible that that smooth white
desolation could contain any sunken chamber of refuge.
Quite suddenly a cry came to their ears--an attenuated scream forced
from the bowels of the earth. To men in their impatient and overstrung
condition it wavered up weird and deathly. With one impulse they
dashed for the path into the thicket, stumbling and pushing and
striving for the lead. It fell to Tuke. Reaching the spot where he
calculated his man had disappeared, he flung about like a nosing
hound, saw where a loose path of undergrowth was swung before a jagged
fissure in the tangle, elbowed it aside, and slipped into a narrow
broken tunnel that seemed to undermine the hill.
A moment he paused. The smell of lifeless earth was about him--a dull
sense of pressure seemed to set his eardrums tattooing. Then his
pupils, relieved of the sheeted glare without, dilated, and he saw the
profound gloom of the passage to be broken into by a little glimmer of
light at its far end. Hearing his companions behind him, he crept on.
So low was the boring that in some places he had to stoop almost
double to pass. But he went forward steadily, and all at once regained
a thought of space and stopped in amazement and concern.
He was in a little circular chamber, whose walls and floor were built
of blocks of unhewn and uncemented stone. Other blocks, roughly
squared and shaped, stood on the level here and there; and against one
of these was piled a heterogeneous heap of human bones, mixed with
fragments of stone implements and arrow-heads and some beads of dull
amber. Over all a flaring dip--wedged into a cleft-stick stuck in a
crevice of the wall--cast a wavering glow. It made manifest the simple
austerity of this antique chamber of the dead; and it did more--it
revealed Dennis on his knees beside a pallet of dried turves, whereon
something long and gaunt and quiet was extended.
“Whimple!” exclaimed his master softly. He felt Luvaine’s breath at
his ear, and extended his arms that the other might not pass. The
servant turned his head. A lost, wild expression was in his eyes.
“Dead!” he muttered, in a dreadful voice.
Tuke went forward and looked down. She had noble sepulture, this
tameless wanderer. What a fiercely handsome face it was--stone in the
midst of stone. But all the age of sixty years of loneliness was
gathered in it, now the informing will was withdrawn. In her long
discipline of hatred she had yielded so little to her fellows, that
not even the right of her burial should be theirs. In her own earth,
after all the long vain baying of the human pack, she had lain herself
down to die of the frost-stroke; and here she was, as much a part of
the ancient cairn as the elf-arrows that were strewn about her.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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