"Drome!" echoed Milton. Rhodes. "I wonder what we are going to find."
"Something wonderful," said I, "or something worse, perhaps, than anything that we have seen."
Rhodes laughed, and I saw Drorathusa (Narkus was leading the way) turn and send a curious glance in our direction.
"Well," I added, "anything to get out of this horrible forest of fungi."
Some minutes passed, perhaps only fifteen, perhaps a half-hour. Of a sudden the great tunnel, now as light as a place on a sunless day, gave a sharp turn to the right; a glad cry broke from the Hypogeans.
"Drome! Drome!" they cried.
We all hurried forward.
"Look!" I said as we reached the turn. "The mouth, the mouth! The tunnel ends!"
There, but two hundred feet or so away, was the great yawning mouth of it—nothing visible through the opening but light, pearly opalescent light, mystic, beautiful.
"Drome!" cried Delphis, clapping her hands.
A few moments, and we were standing at the entrance, gazing out over the weird and beautiful scene.
"Drome!"
I turned at the sound and saw Drorathusa, her figure and mien ineffably Sibylline and majestic, pointing out over the strange landscape, her eyes on the face of Milton Rhodes.
"Drome!" she said again.
"Drome!" echoed Milton. Then to me: "I wonder, Bill, what this Drome really is. And I have an idea that this is only the outskirts that we see. Can we at last be near our journey's end, or is that end still far away?"
"Who can tell? This place seems to be a wilderness."
"Yes; a forest primeval."
"What," said I, "are we destined to find down there?"
"Things stranger, Bill, than explorer ever found anywhere in that strange world above us."
"No gogrugrons, I hope."
Rhodes laughed.
"Gogrugron!" said Drorathusa.
And I saw that horror and fear again in her eyes.
The cavern had come out high up on a broken, jagged wall, which went beetling up for hundreds of feet, up to the roof, which arched away over the landscape before us. We were fully half a thousand feet above the floor, which was a mass of luxuriant tropical forest. Glimpses were caught of a stream down to the left, perhaps the one which we had followed for so long. I judged the place to be more than a mile wide; Rhodes, however, that it was perhaps not quite a mile in the widest part. Down this enormous cavern, the eye could range for three or four miles, at which distance the misty light drew its veil over the forest, the dark walls, and the roof arching across.
At times the light quivered and shook, and there were strange flickerings and dartings of opalescent streaks through it—streaks ineffably beautiful and yet, strangely enough, terrible too, terrible as the blades of plunging swords in hands savage and murderous.
Once more Drorathusa raised a hand and pointed into the misty distance.
"Lepraylya!" she said.
Again her eyes were on Milton Rhodes, and, as she spoke that name, I saw in those wondrous orbs of hers the strangest look, I do believe, that I have ever seen. I wondered if Rhodes too saw it. I found his eyes upon Drorathusa, but there was in them so abstracted an expression that I believed his thoughts were far away and that he had not noticed. When I turned to Drorathusa again, it was to find that the strange look was gone.
