my hand and, as I did so, I started and cried: "Hear that?"
Rhodes made no answer. For some moments we stood there in breathless expectation; but that low mysterious sound did not come again.
"What was that?" I said.
"I wish I knew. It was faint and—well, rather strange."
"It seemed to me," I told him, "to be hollow—like the sound of some great door suddenly closing."
My companion looked at me rather quickly.
"Think so, Bill?" he said. "I thought 'twas the sound of something falling."
There was a pause, during which pause we stood listening and waiting; but the gallery remained as silent as though it had never known the tread of any living thing.
"Well, Bill," said Milton Rhodes suddenly, "we shall never learn what Drome means if we stay in this spot. As for the creepers, I am going to leave mine here."
Milton then wrote a short note, which recorded little more than our names, the date of our great discovery and that we were going farther. This, carefully folded, he placed be-side the creepers and put a rock-fragment upon it. I wondered as I watched him whose would be the eyes that would discover it. Some inhabitant of this underground world, of course, and to such a one the record would be so much Greek. 'Twas utterly unlikely that anyone from that world which we were leaving would ever see that record. I wondered if we should ever see this spot again.
"And now, Bill," said Milton, "down we go!"
And the next moment we were going —had begun our descent into this most mysterious and dreadful place.
Chapter 16
"Are We Entering Dante's Inferno Itself?"
When Scranton came with his weird story of Old He, I was, I confess, not a little puzzled by his and Milton's reference to the extra-ordinary scientific possibilities that it presented. At first I could not imagine what on earth they meant. But I saw all those possibilities very clearly now, and a thousand more I imagined. I knew a wild joy, exultation, and yet at the same time the wonder and the mystery of it all made me humble and sober of spirit. I admit, too, that a fear—a fear for which I can find no adequate name—had laid its palsied and cold fingers upon me.
In a few moments we reached that spot where the angel had vanished. There we paused in curiosity, looking about; but nothing was to be seen. The gallery—which from this point swung sharply to the right and went down at a rather steep angle—was as silent as some interstellar void.
"Bill," smiled Milton Rhodes, "he is idle who might be better employed."
And he started on, or, rather, down. A hundred feet, however (we were now under the glacier) and he halted, turned his light full upon the left-hand wall, pointed and said: "There you are. Bill—the writing on the wall."
I pressed to his side and stood staring. The rock there was as smooth, almost, as a blackboard; and upon it, traced in white chalk, were three inscriptions, with what we took to be names appended to them. That on the right was clearly a very recent one—had been placed there, doubtless, at the most but a few days .since, by that "cavernicolous Venus" that Milton Rhodes had seen for so fleeting a moment.
