We had clambered down the ten feet of jagged rock. We didn't change
size--we had to risk it as we were, for to have got smaller would have
made the descent too great. Somehow we were not discovered. We seemed
to be on the floor of a room. A stone floor--we saw it as a ridged,
uneven rocky plain. Off in the distance was what might have been a
table, chairs, and the legs of seated men.
Ahead of us, a quarter of a mile away, was a cliff-like precipice. I
figured it to be the wall of the room. It seemed darker over there.
We ran. The rock had a small fence around it--a fence which, compared
to the normal room-size, was probably a foot or two high. We darted
through its bars. In five minutes, perhaps, we were in the shelter of
the bottom of the wall. It was seemingly of rocks and earth, piled and
plastered together. It was dank with moisture, but solid to us in this
size.
We stood a moment in the shadows here, panting from the run.
"Where do you suppose this is?" Drake demanded. "Can you make anything
out of it, Frank?"
We were secure for the moment. It was dark over here. Standing with
quiet survey I could imagine that there were three or four men off
there in the distance. That this was a room with a single light
overhead. No window on this side. The other walls were too far away to
be visible.
"The door," said Drake. "That's what we've got to find--got to get out
through it."
But where were we? Certainly this was no room in our home. It looked
as though it might be a place hastily, amateurishly built. But it was
tight. No crevices--no cracks or openings. The bottom of this wall was
plastered solid with wet mud. The air down here was dank and heavy with
moisture.
Dianne murmured, "Listen! That sounds like water."
A strange, muffled reverberating roar sounded from some great distance.
A giant sea pounding? It seemed like that. My heart sank. Why this
could be a place very far from King's Cove. The wild thought came to
me--was this an earthly sound, this muffled pounding of the sea.
I said something like that to Drake.
"Nonsense! They've stolen the rock, Frank, and built this hiding
place--probably not far from King's Cove. Where could they go?"
Dianne said abruptly, "I think this is all very small--this place
they've built down here."
It was a new idea to us. But it seemed probably true. The Togarites
would be in hiding. They had stolen the rock, made it small, and built
this tiny housing place.
Our escape was still undiscovered. Not far from us was a long, slanting
shadow--as though a table perhaps were cutting off the light. We
walked until the shadow was upon us. And by the wall along here was
a neglected pile of caked mud, large as a house to us. We found an
opening like a cave-mouth, and squeezed in.
We were momentarily safe. "You stay here with the girls," I suggested
to Drake. "I'll get large enough to see what the place looks like and
how we can get out."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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