t stinging push of smoke brought
them in under this. They were in a passageway, but when again they
would have made forth and across to the side of the pit, and so, by
climbing, out of it, they found that they could not. Before them lay
now a mere field of fire, and the blowing air drove a biting smoke
against them.

"Move back, until this burns itself out! The earth gave into some kind
of underground room. This is a passage."

It stretched black behind them. Glenfernie caught up a thick, arm-long
piece of lighted wood that would answer for brand. They worked through
a long vaulted tunnel, turned at right angles, and came into what
their torch showed to have been an ancient chapel. In a niche stood a
broken statue, on the wall spread a painting of St. Christopher in
midstream.

"Shall we go on? There must be a way out of this maze."

"If the torch will last us through."

They passed out of the chapel into a place where of old the dead had
been buried. They moved between massy pillars, by the shelves of stone
where the bones lay in the dust. It seemed a great enough hall. At the
end of this they discovered an upward-going stair, but it was old and
broken, and when they mounted it they found that it ended flat against
thick stone, roof to it, pavement, perhaps, to some old church. They
saw by a difference in the flags where had been space, the stair
opening into the hollow of the church; but now was only stone, solid
and thick. They struck against it, but it was moveless, and in the
church, if church there were above, none in the dead night to hear
them. They came down the stair, and through a small, half-blocked
doorway stumbled into a labyrinth of passages and narrow chambers.
They found old pieces of wood--what had been a wine-cask, what might
have had other uses. They broke these into torch lengths, lighting one
from another as that burned down. These underways did not seem wholly
neglected, buried, and forgotten. There lacked any total blocking or
demolition, and there was air. But intricacy and uncertainty reigned.

The mood of the amphitheater when they had sat side by side claimed
them still. There had been a reversion or a coming into fresh space
where quarrel faded like a shadow before light. The light was a
golden, hazy one, made up of myriads of sublimed memories,
associations, judgments, conclusions. Nothing defined emerged from it;
it was simply somewhat golden, somewhat warm light, as from a sun well