isk it; and, putting him off kindly, I mounted the ladder
and raised the trap.

I was in Edmond Czerny's house, and I was alone.

* * *

Now, I had opened the trap, half believing I might find myself in some
room, perhaps in the kitchen of the house. Men would be there, I said,
and Czerny's watch-dogs ready with their questions. But this was not a
true picture; and while there were arc lamps everywhere, the place was
not a room at all, but a circular cavern, with rude apertures in the
wall and curtains hung across in lieu of doors. This was not a little
perplexing, as you will see; and my path was not made more straight
when I heard voices in some room near by, but could not locate them nor
tell which of the doors to avoid.

For a long time I stood, uncertain how to act. In the end I put my head
round the first curtain at a venture, and drew it back as quickly.
There were men in that place, half-naked men, grouped about the door of
a furnace whose red light flashed dazzlingly upon walls and ceiling and
gave its tenants the aspect of crimson devils. What the furnace meant
or why it was built, I was soon to learn; for presently one of the men
gave an order, and upon this an engine started, and a whirr of fans and
the sucking of a distant pump answered to the signal. "Air," said I to
myself; "they are pumping air from above."

The men had not seen me, so quick was I, and so soft with the leather
curtain; and going tiptoe across the cave I stumbled at hazard upon a
door I had not observed before. It was nothing more than a big and
jagged opening in the rock, but it showed me a flight of stairs beyond
it, and twinkling lamps beyond that again. This, I said, must surely be
the road to the sea, for the stairs led upward, and Czerny, as common
sense put it, would occupy the higher rooms. So I did not hesitate any
more about it, but treading the stairway with a cat's foot I went
straight on, and presently struck so fine a corridor that at any other
time I might well have spent an hour in wonder. Lamps were here--scores
of them, in wrought-iron chandeliers. Doors you saw with almost every
step you took--aye, and more than doors--for there were figures in the
light and shadow; men passing to and fro; glimpses of open rooms and
tables spread for cards, and bottles by them; and wild men of all
countries, some sleeping, some quarrelling, some singing, some busy in
kitchen and workshop. By here and there, these men met me in the