"I put on a grey tweed dress, and taking my revolver and bicycle lamp,
stole out of the castle and reached the old chapel. Having lit my lamp,
I rolled back the stone and set out to explore the tunnel. I followed
from your description, the passage to its bifurcating, and determined to
explore the other arm to the reservoir. I easily found it, a deep, dark
tank cut in the rock and seemingly fed by springs which bubbled up from
patches of fine sand, the accumulation of years of wasting rock. Whilst
I was trying to look into the depth of the reservoir, holding my bicycle
lamp so as to throw its light downwards, I saw something white at the
bottom. Just then the lamp from its inverted position began to smoke,
but as I looked in that last moment through the crystal pure water I
recognised that the white object was a skull. In the sudden shock of the
discovery, the lamp dropped from my hand and disappeared hissing and
bubbling in the last flicker of light." As she told me this, I took her
hand for I feared that the memory of such an appalling moment must have
unnerved her; but to my surprise her nerves were as firm as my own. She
let her hand remain in mine; but she had evidently understood my thought
for she said:
"Oh! it's all right now, Archie. For a moment or two I do believe I was
frightened. You can have the laugh on me there if you like! But then
common sense came to my aid. I was in a tight place, and it would need
all I knew to get out. I thought the matter over as coolly as I could;
and do you know that coolness seemed to grow with the effort! I was in
the dark, in a cave, deep underground, the entrance to which was secret;
I had no means of getting a light even for an instant, for though I had
taken plenty of wax matches they were all in my lamp. The only thing I
could do was to try to grope my way out. I had noted the passage as
I came along, but I found so soon as I had felt my way out of the
reservoir chamber, how little use an abstract recollection is when every
second there is a new detail. I found, too, the astonishing difference
between sight and touch; what I had remembered had been with my eyes and
not with my fingers. I had to guard all round me, my head, my feet, my
sides. I am amazed, now when I think of it, how many different kinds of
mistakes and calculations I made in a few yards. It seemed a terribly
long time till I came to the place where the passage forks. There I
weighed up the matter of whether it would be better to go back by the
way I had come to the old chapel, or to go up the other passage to the
monument of which you told me. Somehow the latter seemed to me the more
feasible. I think it must have been that I trusted you more than myself.
You had not shrunk from going into that passage; and I would not shrink
from going out."
I squeezed her hands hard, I had got both by this time. She blushed a
little and looked at me fondly and went on:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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