"As you like," I answered.

He moved toward the mouth of the burrow, then stopped and turned toward
me. "What time is it?"

"It's ten minutes of midnight," I replied.

"We've got six hours," he whispered. "Come along, we'll chance it."

Very cautiously we moved into the darkness of the passageway, feeling
our way along the walls that were cold and damp from the moisture which
had soaked through from the crown of the cliff. The place was not more
than five feet wide, and as I walked along on one side of the wall,
Holman, feeling his way along the other, could touch me whenever he
wished to ascertain my position. Our shoes made no sound upon the floor
of the corridor. It was covered deep with fine dust, upon which we
walked noiselessly.

An occasional bat fluttered past us, but outside the flapping of the
wings not a sound disturbed the stillness of the place. The silence of
the outside was intensified a hundredfold. In the open, one heard the
crooning of the trees as the soft winds from the Pacific played with
their heavy foliage, but in the natural passage through which we crawled
in search of Leith the air felt as if it had not been disturbed for
centuries. It was heavy and thick, possessing a faint odour that seemed
to rise from the dust beneath our feet.

We had walked about one hundred yards along the corridor when it widened
suddenly. The walls that we were following turned off at right angles,
and from the moonlight which filtered through a dozen small fissures
high up above our heads we saw that we had entered a cavern of vast
proportions. We sensed its vastness. The few streaks of moonlight that
stabbed the darkness were like so many guide-posts that enabled us to
make a mental calculation of the height and extent of the place.

We stopped and moved together instinctively. Holman put his mouth close
to my ear.

"What do you make of it?" he asked.

"It might be a cavern leading into the one that runs out to the face of
the cliff," I replied.

"But how are we to cross it?"

"I can't tell you. I'm afraid if we leave this opening that we'll get
lost."

It was rather plain that we would. The surrounding walls were as black
as the opening by which we had entered the place, and we stood with
quick-beating hearts staring out across the place through which the bars
of moonlight appeared like silver skewers.

One of these skewers fell upon a ledge of stone some few yards in front
of the spot where we we