That’s why Dmitro Borisovich was constantly on the alert, afraid of missing any other instructions Pronis could have left on the wall in addition to the ones indicated in the text. The archeologist was lighting the way with his miner’s lamp very carefully, and the patch of light thrown by it moved in front of him in an erratic pattern, revealing jagged protruding rocks, unexpected turns or steep rises.
The light from the lamp of Artem who was walking in the rear of the party, produced even more phantasmagoric effects. It gave the figures in front of him giant shadows which moved along the walls, jumped one over the other, curved up to the ceiling, and broke into phantasmagoric shapes which assumed the weirdest of configurations.
For some time they walked in silence. The archeologist was the first to break it:
“The head of a Scythian!” he called out solemnly, pointing to the representation of the head carved into the rock, with sharp severe features of the face in profile. Despite its rough, crude lines, the carving’s expressiveness revealed the dexterous hand of an ancient artist. The face, with its short nose and small beard, must have captured the distinct features of a warrior from the very remote past.
It was the very head Artem had seen yesterday, but now they had to turn in a different direction since the route Artem had taken the previous day was only a dead end. Artem looked at the map to see if it were accurate on that point, and in fact, the passage indicated that the way to the walled section was a dead end — the first proof that the map showed the actual layout of the passages.
Dmitro Borisovich walked on without hesitation and without consulting the map. He knew the way. They turned left, then began descending. The floor of the passage turned to soft ground quite different from the rocks they had been treading on just a short while ago. But the walls remained as rocky as before.
“That’s the sediment from the water that once flowed through here,” Ivan Semenovich commented in a low voice, writing something down in his notebook. “It must have been a sort of subterranean river. Hm, a curious point: it flowed not lo llie surface but the other way round, into the depths of the mount…”
“Hold it!” Dmitro Borisovich called out. He stopped at the new fork. “Artem, which way should we turn according to the map?”
“To the right,” Artem said with conviction.
“And what’s this?” Ivan Semenovich said, lifting his lamp high into the air.
Immediately above them, the representation of a horse was carved into the rock. It was a surprisingly good image: the steed seemed poised to jump, its hind legs slightly bent.
“Aha, the horse!” Dmitro Borisovich said triumphantly. “The first horse of those mentioned in the text. There should be two more somewhere on our way. Forward, forward!”
They saw the second horse at the next fork; Artem, after consulting the map, announced that they should take the right fork. Then he continued with an irrefutable conclusion at which he had just arrived:
“The horses mean we should take the right fork, and the heads mean we should go left. Besides, the arrows under the carvings point in the proper direction.”
At first, as was her habit, Lida expressed her doubts as to the validity of Artem’s hasty conclusion, but soon enough, she saw for herself that again, Artem’s hypothesis was correct; at the next fork, the carving of a human head appeared on the wall, and sure enough, they had to turn left. Artem beamed with satisfaction. They had been right in entrusting him with the map!
Dmitro Borisovich had not yet found much to rejoice in. They were already several hundred meters from the entrance, but he had not yet come across anything directly related to archeology, with the exception of the carvings, of course. But they, valuable enough in themselves, were not a phenomenon previously unknown to science; similar representations were rather well studied. Besides, these heads and horses had not yet taken them anywhere in particular.
The archeologist realized though, that it was much too early to jump to conclusions, but nevertheless, he couldn’t help remarking grudgingly:
“Imagine: it looks like no one has walked here since ancient times. Surely we’ll find something, won’t we?”
Ivan Semenovich was somewhat disappointed at the fact that no ore veins could be seen in the walls. In spite of this, he tried to remain cheerful. “We’ll see what lies further ahead,” he kept telling himself. “So far, we’ve been going steadily downward. We must be at least a hundred and fifty meters below the surface.” Ivan Semenovich made another note in his book.
The third and fourth horses were a short distance away, and as before the horses indicated right turns, and the head, a left one. The expedition continued deeper and deeper into the bowels of the mount. Now they were two hundred meters underground.
“Which way had the water been flowing?” said Lida, who was evidently thinking something over. “If it was downward, maybe we’ll find ourselves on the shore of an underground lake in the end. Right, Ivan Semenovich?”
The geologist did not reply straight away. He scrutinized the walls, the ceiling, and the ground of the underground passage. Artem was eagerly awaiting his reply. It would be great to discover an underground lake!
“Nothing can be said with certainty at the moment,” Ivan Semenovich replied at last. “At first, to tell the truth, I also thought that the underground river flowed downward. But now I’m not so sure.”
“Why?”
“Don’t you understand? Shame on you — a future geologist who should have observed and analyzed all the evidence concerning the rock bedding and layers. If you’re going to blush, Lida, don’t, because it was what I thought myself at first. Let’s look more closely into the matter. If the water was indeed flowing downward, where was its source? Remember, the entrance to the cave is rather high up on the slope of the mount. One could assume that the water first ran down the slope and then entered the mouth of the cave. But in that case, it couldn’t possibly have cut such a deep track in the rocks.”
“In other words you want to say that the water was flowing upward?” asked Lida in surprise.
“That’s not impossible. Let’s assume there was a large underground lake inside the mount into which water trickled down from the upper layers and got trapped there. At the point of overflowing, the water would begin finding a way out through the cracks. Don’t forget about the atmospheric pressure: that’s quite a significant factor. The water would begin eroding the cracks, making them wider and turning some of them into veritable river beds — similar to the one we’re walking on — in the course of thousands upon thousands of years. Oil or water geysers provide us with a similar phenomenon, after all.”
“Now I understand,” Lida said in a low voice.
“In the process I’ve described, at some point in time, the inflow of water could have been reduced for some reason, and the underground lake then would run dry, leaving a large empty space, polished inside with water — what we call a cave. Yes, I’m of the opinion that the water was in fact flowing upward.”
But neither Artem nor Lida had time to comment the geologist’s hypothesis. Dmitro Borisovich cried out something unintelligible, overwhelmed with surprise. The rest uttered inarticulate cries of amazement simultaneously.
The passage came to an abrupt end as though it dissolved into nothing. Like a river emptying into the sea, the underground passage emptied into a huge cave, pitch-black dark and menacing. The bright light from their miner’s lamps was not powerful enough to win from the darkness even a small part of this immense cave. The light reached only the parts of the walls closest to them, and against the overwhelming blackness, the lamps seemed to have been reduced to feeble candlelights. The thick unbroken darkness hung before them like a coarse black carpet. Everyone stood in silence, overcome by the new discovery.