"I ran a picnic here all to myself. It is as
well to find new lodgings if the old don't suit. I left my lantern
behind me, and this it is, I reckon."

He pulled up from the depths a gauze lantern such as miners use, and,
lighting it, he showed us the heart of the pit. It was a deep hole, 30
feet down, perhaps, and strewn with rubbish and fragments of the iron
rocks. But what was worth more to us, aye, than a barrel of gold, was
the sweet, fresh air which came to us through a tunnel's mouth as by a
siphon from the open sea herself; and, blowing freshly on our faces,
sent us quickly down towards it with glad cries and the spirits of men
who have broken a prison gate.

"The sea, the sea, by all that's holy!" cries Peter Bligh. "Oh, doctor,
I breathe, I breathe, as I am a Christian man, I breathe!"

We tumbled down into the pit headlong and sat there for many minutes
wondering if, indeed, the death were passed or if we must face it again
in the minutes to come. There before us, once we had passed the
tunnel's mouth, stood a vast, domed hall which, I declare, men might
have cut and not Nature in the depths of that strange cavern.

Open to the day through great apertures high up in the face of the
cliff, a soft glow like the light which comes through the windows of a
church streamed upon the rocky floor and showed us the wonders of that
awesome place. Room upon room, we saw, cave upon cave; some round like
the mosques a Turk can build, others lofty and grand as any cathedral;
some pretty as women's dens, all decked with jewels and ornament of
jasper and walls of the blackest jet. These things I saw; these rooms I
passed through. A magician might have conjured them up; and yet he was
no magician, but only Duncan Gray, the man I knew for the first time
yesterday, but already called a comrade.

"Doctor," I said, "it is a house of miracles, truly! But where to
now--aye, that's the question; where to?"

He sat upon a stone, and we grouped ourselves about him. Peter Bligh
took out a pipe from his pocket and was not forbidden to light it.
There was a distant sound in the cave like that of water rushing, and
once another sound to which I could give no meaning. The doctor himself
was still thinking deeply, as though hazarding a guess as to our
position.

"Boys," he said, "I'll tell you the whole story. This place was
discovered by Hoyt, a Dutchman. If Czerny had read his book, he would
know of it; but he hasn't. I took the tr