, all right. I told him that if she wished
to say anything to us, she could do it in person; that we weren't
afraid of her, of him, or all the Lakonians who ever breathed green
soup and called it air. He's a simple soul, and easily impressed. So
we got by."

"Nice work," I commended him. "It's an auspicious start, anyway."

* * * * *

The mouth of the mine was not the usual vertical shaft; as Fetters had
told us, it was a great ramp, of less than forty-five degrees, leading
underground, illuminated by jets of greenish flame from metal brackets
set into the wall at regular intervals, and fed by a never-failing
interplay of natural gas. The passageway was of varying height and
width, but nowhere less than three times my height from floor to
ceiling, and it was broad enough at its narrowest so that ten men
might have marched easily abreast.

The floor, apparently, had been smoothed by human effort, but for the
rest, the corridor was, to judge from the evidence, entirely natural
for the walls of shiny black rock bore no marks of tools.

At intervals, other passages branched off from the main one we were
following, at greater and less angles, but these were much narrower,
and had very apparently been hewn in the solid rock. Like the central
passage, they were utterly deserted.

"We'll be coming out on the other side, pretty soon," commented Correy
after a steady descent of perhaps twenty minutes. "This tunnel must go
all the way through. I--what's that?"

We paused and listened. From behind us came a soft, whispering sound,
the nature of which we could not determine.

"Sounds like the shuffle of many feet, far behind," suggested Kincaide
gravely.

"Or, more likely, the air rushing around the corners of those smaller
passages," I suggested. "This is a drafty hole. Or it may be just the
combined flarings of all these jets of flame."

"Maybe you're right, sir," nodded Correy. "Anyway, we won't worry
about it until we have to. I guess we just keep on going?"

"That seems to be about all there is to do; we should enter one of the
big subterranean chambers Fetters mentioned, before long."

* * * * *

As a matter of fact, it was but a minute or two later, that we turned
a curve in the corridor and found ourselves looking into a vast open
space, the roof supported by huge pillars of black stone, and the
floor littered with rocky debris and mining tools thr