As he went down the tunnel again he noticed that there were more branches than he had remembered: it seemed to be a part of the sly madness of the place that they should multiply silently in the dark. He explored some of them but had to retrace his steps, for they became, in one way or another, impassable; and then, suddenly, he found himself in the high chamber that he had missed.
He stood and called again and swung his torch slowly from side to side. Surely, he decided, she must be here: she could not have gone much further, exhausted, in darkness. He swung the beam of his torch to the sandy floor and saw her footmarks. The prints led him to the middle of the cave, and there he stopped short while a shiver of horror ran from his scalp right down his body. The last imprint was in the slime on the rocks by the side of the pool, and floating at the edge of the water was one of his gauntlets. Nothing more.
He never found anything more. They had taught her so much, he thought grimly, but they had never taught her to swim. He was stricken by a great pang of sorrow and remorse; he spent the next hour in a morbid and hopeless examination of the cave, and then went wearily back to the beach where he propped himself between two rocks until dawn. He had no fear of sleeping; he had a greater, half-delirious fear of something unspeakable coming out of the tunnel mouth—something unquenchable from a thousand million million miles away—something that had spoken to him first on a dark night such as this.
Nothing came, and after the first hour or so of daylight a naval launch swept in from seaward. He made no attempt to move, even after the launch reached the island, and the crew found him staring out over the ever-changing pattern of the sea.