"What is he saying?" Thorinn asked. "Let me hear what he says." Now the man himself began speaking, but it was gibberish; Thorinn could not understand a word. The ball was tiny now, and to one side of it, over the man's head, a dot of yellow light appeared. It grew slowly; suddenly it was very big and bright, and Thorinn could see flames leaping from its surface. Then it all vanished, and instead he was looking at a green landscape dotted with men and women who were all standing looking up at something huge and flat and silvery that was receding slowly overhead, as if somehow they had brought the sky down, then raised it again. The man's voice was still speaking, but Thorinn could not see him. Now the sky was high overhead, where it belonged, and little dark engines were moving across it.
Then they were underground, watching a huge engine that ate its way into the solid rock, leaving a bright round tunnel behind. Then there were scenes of great caverns full of engines and people, and floating egg-shaped things that crossed the caverns and darted along tunnels, up and down shafts, all brightly lit, shining... Then the brown man again, and behind him a picture like the drawing of the Underworld the box had showed him before, only that it was circular, with many rings one inside the other, and four straight lines radiating from the smallest circle of all, in the center. Then the circle changed into a ball again; this time it was white. Watching these pictures made Thorinn uneasy in a way he could not understand; it was like being afraid, and because there was nothing to be afraid of, that made him angry. The brown man was still speaking, the yellow point of light had appeared, and the silvery ball, shrunken to a dot, was crawling away toward a cloud of other bright dots. Now the other dots swung, came closer, darting forward like frostflakes in a storm until only one hung in the center of the crystal, growing larger and brighter.
"That's enough," Thorinn said. The crystal went dark. He had been watching so long that he had grown thirsty again, and had to unwrap the jug, let it fill, drink, and then wrap it up again. The smallest piece of cloth he had was far too bulky to carry, but he cut off a strip an ell wide and as long as he was tall. He spread this on the floor and rolled up his cheeseboxes and other things in it—clothing, shoes, the little figurines, tools and knives, the talking box, some leftover jewels—turning the ends in as he went. He did this twice over before he had the roll packed to his liking, with the heavier things in the middle, the food outside where it could be easily reached. He tied it with strips of cloth, and cut other strips to make loops which would fit over his shoulders. He changed the moss in his light-box, shouldered his burdens, and set off past the ends of the aisles, counting his paces. The tall columns marched past him with their heads buried in the darkness. Here and there small parcels had been knocked to the floor, and he conjectured that the earth-shock must have done that, when Snorri began to rumble; probably that was the cause, too, of the gap in the wall through which he had entered. Before that, the cavern must have been sealed up... how long?
When he had gone two hundred and ninety ells, he turned down the nearest aisle and began counting his paces again. The endless ranks of columns moved past him in the glow of the light-box. When he paused to listen, there was no sound. When he had gone eight hundred and forty ells, a gray wall loomed up ahead: he had reached the end of the cavern. He swung himself up onto the nearest rack and began to climb it.
The bottoms of the stacks disappeared; he was climbing in the fitful glow of his light-box with darkness all around. In the silence, the rack with its gray bundles seemed to glide downward past his body, as if he were not climbing at all but hanging in midair and pulling down more and more of an endless metal serpent. In a few moments he saw a dim gray reflection overhead. It was the ceiling, and when he stood on top of the stack a moment later he could reach up and touch it with his hands. He could see the tops of other stacks to left and right, gray hummocks rising out of the darkness, but there was no sign of any opening in the roof of the cave.
He turned away from the cavern wall, leaped to the next stack, then to the next, examining the ceiling from each. When he had traversed ten stacks in this way, he leaped the aisle to the next row and began working back along it, meaning to trace a path around and around the original ten stacks, like a man winding string on a twig, until he found the opening; but he had hardly begun his second cast when it appeared, off to his left: a round black hole in the ceiling.
The shaft was circular and three spans wide, like the one that had led him into the cavern he had mistaken for the Midworld. Standing under it and stretching up his arm with the light-box, he thought he could even make out a brownish something that might be a shield closing it at the top. When he stood on his toes, he could just get his hands onto the smooth walls of the shaft; but that was no matter. He planted himself directly under the opening, bent his knees, leaped. As he shot up into the opening, he put out his arms and knees, braced himself, came to rest. A thrust and a wriggle, and he was half an ell farther up; now he could support himself with hands and one foot against one side, back against the other. Hampered a little by the bundle across his shoulders, he was still able to climb rapidly enough. In a few moments his head was touching the brown hollow disk that closed the shaft. He touched it, and it swung aside; a black cusp widened to a circle. He was up, through it into darkness that turned suddenly to a flicker of pale light.
As those vast arching shapes exploded around him in a kind of silent sizzling, Thorinn flattened himself to the floor. The cold shield was under his hand; he slapped it, felt it swing, felt the cool upward breath, then the shaft walls were burning his hands and knees as he braked his fall; the shield swung over his head and the light was gone.
With pounding heart, Thorinn hung in the shaft and stared upward. There was no sound. He tried to remember what he had seen: vast arcs of light that swooped up flickering into the darkness... What could it have been? He held himself ready to let go and drop instantly, if the shield should begin to turn; but nothing happened. At last he climbed the shaft again.
He put his hand on the shield, turned it carefully. A lozenge of darkness appeared; there was no sound, no scent of danger. Thorinn widened the opening until it was black and round above him. With painstaking caution he thrust his head up; then, bracing himself to hold the shield open, he raised his arm with the light-box. Darkness. He raised himself a little, head and shoulders through the opening; and a sudden flicker burst almost under his chin, ran away swooping and shimmering upward in multiple arcs...
When he ducked his head, the flickering died; darkness returned. He raised himself again. The lights sprang up, flickering, swooping far overhead. They steadied, burned clear and cold. Thorinn raised himself a little more, cautiously, then still more, and climbed out.
He was standing at the bottom of a vast tunnel whose walls curved up to become the ceiling an incredible distance overhead. The lines of light ringed it; the nearest of these, only an ell away, was a white ribbon that curved up, up, growing thinner until it was no more than a bright thread above. On either side of it were others, set three ells apart. In one direction they were dazzling bright, in the other much dimmer and more diffuse; he counted twenty of each. The reason for the difference, he saw, was that the rings were lighted only on one side, so that in one direction he saw not the lights themselves but their reflections in the tunnel wall. As he looked down the tunnel, the farthest rings were perfect upright circles, but those nearer to him grew fatter at the bottom until they were vast egg-shapes that leaned together overhead. He was trembling with awe; why had the box not made him understand how huge these tunnels were? He felt himself tiny and exposed; the distant rings were like giants' eyes staring. He glanced at the closed shield in the floor, then leaned to examine the nearest ring more closely. The floor was made of some smooth, hard substance; embedded in it, the ring stood up two spans high, hollow on the bright side, flat on the other, with a flat dark edge the breadth of his hand. He touched the dark surface cautiously, then the bright: one was as cool as the other.