r the rest--"

He was stooping again, with his candle all but level with the ledge and
a few inches wide of it. Held so, it cast a feeble ray into the black
void below us: and down there--thirty feet down perhaps--as his talk
broke in two like a snapped guitar-string, my eyes caught a blur of
scarlet.

"For God's sake," I cried, "hold the light steady!"

"To what purpose?" he asked grimly. "That is one whom Providence did
not lead out to light. See, he is broken to pieces--you can tell from
the way he lies; and dead, too. My son, the caves of Rueda protect
themselves."

He shuffled to the end of the ledge, and there, at the entrance of a
dark gallery, so low that our heads almost knocked against the
rock-roof, he halted again and leaned his ear against the wall on the
right.

"Sometimes where the wall is thin I have heard them crying and beating
on it with their fists."

I shivered. The reader knows me by this time for a man of fair
courage: but the bravest man on earth may be caught off his own ground,
and I do not mind confessing that here was a situation for which a stout
parentage and a pretty severe training had somehow failed to provide.
In short, as my guide pushed forward, I followed in knock-knee'd terror.
I wanted to run. I told myself that if this indeed were a trap, and he
should turn and rush upon me, I was as a child at his mercy.
And he might do worse: he might blow out the light and disappear.
As the gallery narrowed and at the same time contracted in height, so
that at length we were crawling on hands and knees, this insanity grew.
Two or three times I felt for my knife, with an impulse to drive it
through his back, seize the candles and escape: nor at this moment can I
say what restrained me.

At length, and after crawling for at least two hundred yards, without
any warning he stood erect: and this was the worst moment of all.
For as he did so the light vanished--or so nearly as to leave but the
feeblest glimmer, the reason being (and I discovered it with a sob) that
he stood in an ample vaulted chamber while I was yet beneath the roof of
the tunnel. The first thing I saw on emerging beside him was the belly
of a great wine-tun curving out above my head, its recurve hidden, lost
somewhere in upper darkness: and the first thing I heard was the whip of
a bat's wing by the candle. My guide beat it off.

"Better take a candle and light it from mine. These creatures breed
here in thousan