end into unknown depths.

How long had they proceeded thus? Gwynplaine could not tell.

Moments passed under such crushing agony seem immeasurably prolonged.

Suddenly they halted.

The darkness was intense.

The corridor widened somewhat. Gwynplaine heard close to him a noise of
which only a Chinese gong could give an idea; something like a blow
struck against the diaphragm of the abyss. It was the wapentake striking
his wand against a sheet of iron.

That sheet of iron was a door.

Not a door on hinges, but a door which was raised and let down.

Something like a portcullis.

There was a sound of creaking in a groove, and Gwynplaine was suddenly
face to face with a bit of square light. The sheet of metal had just
been raised into a slit in the vault, like the door of a mouse-trap.

An opening had appeared.

The light was not daylight, but glimmer; but on the dilated eyeballs of
Gwynplaine the pale and sudden ray struck like a flash of lightning.

It was some time before he could see anything. To see with dazzled eyes
is as difficult as to see in darkness.

At length, by degrees, the pupil of his eye became proportioned to the
light, just as it had been proportioned to the darkness, and he was able
to distinguish objects. The light, which at first had seemed too bright,
settled into its proper hue and became livid. He cast a glance into the
yawning space before him, and what he saw was terrible.

At his feet were about twenty steps, steep, narrow, worn, almost
perpendicular, without balustrade on either side, a sort of stone ridge
cut out from the side of a wall into stairs, entering and leading into
a very deep cell. They reached to the bottom.

The cell was round, roofed by an ogee vault with a low arch, from the
fault of level in the top stone of the frieze, a displacement common to
cells under heavy edifices.

The kind of hole acting as a door, which the sheet of iron had just
revealed, and on which the stairs abutted, was formed in the vault, so
that the eye looked down from it as into a well.

The cell was large, and if it was the bottom of a well, it must have
been a cyclopean one. The idea that the old word "_cul-de-basse-fosse_"
awakens in the mind can only be applied to it if it were a lair of wild
beasts.

The cell was neither flagged nor paved. The bottom was of that cold,
moist earth peculiar to deep places.

In the midst of the cell, four low and disproportioned columns sustained
a