sages leading out of it. And so it would be well to make sure of
recognizing this one again before he loosed his hold on it. So he
pulled off one boot, and feeling carefully round the opening, placed it
just inside as a landmark.

Then he groped on along the right-hand wall to learn the size of the
chamber, and was immediately thankful that his own passage was safely
marked, for he came on another opening, and another, and another, and
labelled them carefully in his mind, "One, two, three."

It was truly eerie work, groping there in that dense darkness and utter
silence, and trying to the nerves even of one who had never known
himself guilty of such things. But, being there, he was determined to
learn all he could.

He clung to his right-hand wall as to a life-rope. If he once got mazed
in a place like that he might never taste daylight and upper air again.

Of the size of the chamber he could so far form no opinion. He would
have given much for a light. His flint and steel were indeed in his
pocket, but he was sodden through and through, and had no means whatever
of catching a spark if he struck one.

Then, as he groped cautiously along past the third opening, his progress
was stayed, and not by rock.

He was on his knees, his hands feeling blindly, but with infinite
enquiry, along the rough rock wall, when he stumbled suddenly over
something that lay along the ground. Dropping his hands to save himself
from falling, they lighted on that which lay below, and he started back
with an exclamation and a shudder. For what he had felt was like the
hair and face of a man.

He crouched back against the wall, his heart thumping like a ship's
pump, and the blood belling in his ears, and sat so for very many
minutes; sat on, until, in that silent blackness, he could hear the
dull, far-away thud of the waves on the outer walls of the island.

Then, by degrees, he pulled himself together. If it was indeed a man, he
was undoubtedly dead, and therefore harmless; and having learned this
much he would know more.

So presently he groped forward, felt again the round head and soft hair,
and below it and beyond it a heap of what felt like small oblong
packages done up in wrappings of cloth and tied round with cord.

He picked one up and handled it inquisitively, with a shrewd idea of
what might be, or might have been, inside. The cord was very loose, as
though the contents had shrunk since it was tied. As he fumbled with it
in