Suddenly Marjory cried out. I raised my head and looked at her. Her
face, lit by the rays of my own lamp which, with the habit of searching
now familiar to me I had turned as my eyes turned, was radiant with joy
and excitement.
"Look! look!" she cried. "Oh, Archie, there is the top of an opening
here. The stones fill it up." As she spoke she pushed at a stone on the
top of the pile; under her hand it moved and disappeared with a hollow
rattle. By this time I had scrambled up the slippery pile and was beside
her. The disappearance of the stone had enlarged the opening, and
something like a foot square was discovered.
So we began to work at the heap of stones, only we pulled and threw
them into the cave where we were so as not to block the place we aimed
at. The top layer of stones was easy to move, as they were comparatively
small, and were not interlocked, but below them we found a much more
difficult task. Here the rocks were larger and more irregular in shape,
and their points and edges interlocked. We did not mind, however, but
toiled on. I could not but notice as we did so, a trait of Marjory's
coolness of head in the midst of all her excitement, when she took from
her pocket a pair of heavy gloves and put them on.
In some fifteen or twenty minutes we had unmasked a hole sufficiently
large to pass through comfortably. I found that the oil of my lamp was
running low; so I refilled it and Marjory's also. Then holding my own
lamp carefully, whilst Marjory turned hers in the direction I was going,
I passed over the top of the miniature moraine, and in a few seconds was
on the floor of the other cave. Marjory threw me the ball of string and
scrambling down joined me at once. We went along carefully, for the roof
of the cave dipped very low and we had in more than one place to bend
considerably; even then we were walking in a couple of feet of water as
the floor dipped as well as the roof. When we had gone some distance,
however, the roof rose as the cave turned sharp to the left, round a
corner of very broken and jagged rock in which I could see signs of the
fusion of the two geological formations. Our hearts beat high and we
took hands instinctively; we were now confident that we were in the
treasure house at last.
As we went up the cave, here running, so far as I could ascertain by the
compass, straight in and from the sea, we could note, as we turned our
lamps now and again to either side, that on our left was all black rock
whilst on the right was all red. The cave was not a long one; nothing
to compare with those we had left. It was not very many seconds, though
we had to go slow as we did not know for certain as to the floor level,
before the cave began to expand.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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