They were standing in another corridor, but longer than the first, and ending in a narrow causeway over a spring. “Dear me,” said Graecen. It was impossible that so small a spring should produce this thunderous echo; his own voice as he spoke sounded distorted and magnified out of all recognition Campion was pushing the others from behind. “Forward,” said the guide, swinging his lantern and advancing, while Virginia Dale timidly held on to the corner of his overcoat. They shuffled in single file along the stony path, ducked through another corridor, and crossed the middle-sized antechamber.
Mrs. Truman had taken her husband’s arm. She gave it excited little tugs, not to signal anything in particular, but simply to register her pleasure and excitement. “What a place,” said Truman, turning his torch-beam this way and that. Fearmax was peering about him with his eyes screwed up, and with an uneasy expression upon his face.
“Sounds like a river somewhere,” said Virginia Dale, and the guide who had been lacing up his shoes gave her a glance of approbation and repeated his cry of “Forward”. He started to walk into the darkness beyond the dazzle of torch-light, swinging before him the little yellow puddle of light cast by the hurricane lamp. They followed him slowly, picking their way through the dimness over mounds of rubble and huge boulders which seemed, in the gloom, to bear the trace of human working. The fragile beam of Truman’s torch seemed quite inadequate to pierce the almost solid blackness of the place; it showed merely a number of ledges covered thickly with the droppings of bats, while, when he turned it upward towards the roof, it simply thinned away and evaporated, rendering nothing. “This way to the two and sixes,” said his wife behind him in the shadow and gave a little tug at the tail of his coat.
Fearmax was busily examining a heap of stone and rubble from some ancient landslide. Campion stood by him striking matches and peering. Between them they lifted one or two of the stones and turned them over. “No, I don’t think they are worked,” Campion was saying when the other interrupted him with a cry: “Look out!” A large scorpion stared unwinking into the beam of torchlight, its tail set as if by a spring, to strike. Fearmax laughed ruefully and they made their way farther along in pursuit of the others. “Lucky I didn’t sit on it,” said Campion.
After negotiating the two small chambers, the whole party passed in single file down a rock-gallery which opened off from between them. “I think we’ve gone far enough,” said Virginia Dale. “Don’t you? It’s so eerie.” Despite the coldness of the air Graecen was sweating. He turned off his torch and mopped his forehead. The poor girl was afraid. He didn’t blame her. Truman, however, whistled a few bars of “The Merry Widow Waltz”, and in the darkness — the cold eddy-less air of the cavern — it had a consoling human ring.
The gallery led them down at an ever-steepening angle until they stood before another natural door in the rock. The ladies found their feet beginning to hurt in their high-heeled shoes; all except for Mrs. Truman, whose rope soles were ideal for these harsh variations of surface and direction. Once assembled, the guide counted them as if they had been chickens. “Now please together,” he said earnestly, “and careful too.” Elsie Truman gave an excited tug at her husband’s arm and he replied by pinching her arm reassuringly; in the little booth of light from the torches he saw her face with its young, friendly lines turned towards the short tunnel which was to lead them yet farther into the labyrinth.
“Another cave,” said Graecen.
“Underground river,” said the guide with a ridiculously proprietary air. It was obvious from his manner that the Jannadis Brothers were responsible for all these wonders. He placed the tail of his coat once more in Virginia’s reluctant hand, and ordered them all to follow suit. Lantern in hand, he led his shuffling crocodile through the tunnel and into a cavern with a discernible flue in which filtered the vague semblance of light from the outside world; the reflections were strong enough for them to mark the track of the stream which passed through the farther end of the cavern with the noise of a miniature electric train. It flowed, greenish black, without a ripple except where it once more disappeared by vaulting clear through a piece of natural fan-vaulting. Truman knelt down beside it but his torch could not pierce the dark water. This time the interest and excitement of the party was not quite so loudly expressed. A silence had fallen on them; a sense of fatigue and suffocation at being so long out of the air. Yet when Graecen looked at his watch he found that they had spent barely half an hour in the labyrinth. And the air they breathed was cold and pure.
“Can we cross it?” said Mrs. Truman.
“Yes, please,” said the guide with alacrity, leading them to an overhanging bluff from which they could see a line of stepping-stones dotting the shining surface of the water. Despite its speed Fearmax noticed that the water did not break upon these stones but flowed round them, black and even as silk. He dabbled his fingers in the stream and withdrew them almost at once, exclaiming against the coolness of it. “What is odd,” he said to Campion, “is the rubbing noise; because the bed is scooped clean out of rock, and yet one seems to hear gravel being churned down it or something.” They stared down for a moment on to that placid surface, while the guide demonstrated how easy a crossing was for the benefit of Mr. Truman, whose native caution had suggested that the stepping-stones might sink. The guide, however, walked with an exaggerated sure-footedness, and appeared to satisfy the rest of them that the journey involved no great hazard. Virginia Dale, after a number of false starts and hesitations, obeyed Graecen’s promptings and crossed, holding tight to his hand. They followed, one by one.
It was when Fearmax was mid-way across that they heard it for the first time: a long-drawn muffled roar which rose above the noise of the stream and echoed through the wilderness of galleries which surrounded them. The guide waved his lantern excitedly and laughed. “Good heavens,” said Fearmax, standing on the last stone, “what on earth was that?” They stood still, listening to the sound as it slowly died away in the distance.
“It was not a roar,” said Graecen, “was it?” Mrs Truman was reminded of the upstairs’ lodgers moving furniture about during a spring clean. Sound became so mangled and magnified in those corridors that it might be anything, thought Fearmax, with a superstitious dread.
“The minotaur,” said Campion to no one in particular.
“A very queer sound though,” said Fearmax, “very queer.” The sound had tailed away into a series of dim tremulous reverberations which knocked and banged their way into the distance. It was like the banging noise of an engine, knocking one truck against another, into infinity. In each new cavern the echo was further distorted and further magnified as it was passed on. What could it be?
They stood still for a moment to listen, forming a clear tableau in the light, and reflected upside down in the black waters of the stream, Fearmax and Campion sharing the last two stepping-stones; Virginia’s hand clasped in Graecen’s; the Truman couple sitting idly on a rock, side by side.