"Here goes," Remo said, entering the cave.
Wide at the mouth, the cave became more like a tunnel the deeper Remo passed into it. The feel of porous volcanic rock against his bare soles was unpleasant, but as his tough soles became accustomed to it, he soon put it out of his mind.
The ceiling sloped downward. Remo was forced to bend his head to keep walking.
Thirty feet in, the tunnel branched off in two directions. Remo paused and tried to figure out the right way to go. After a moment he realized that one branch went south toward where the cave exit was supposed to be.
Then again, since this whole test was Chiun's idea, the most logical choice was probably the wrong one. Remo took the northern tunnel, suppressing a grin of confidence.
It evaporated when he came to a blank wall before a quiet pool. In the darkness his feet discovered the pool. There was no sign of any secret walls or other exits.
Grumbling, Remo backtracked and followed the southern branch.
After about the same distance, it too stopped at a blank wall. Only this time there was no pool.
"Don't tell me I blew it," said Remo.
He felt the walls for levers or catches. Finding none, he padded back to the north tunnel.
When he reached the pool, he knelt before it and touched the water with his fingertips. It was cool to the touch. He brought the moistened tip of one finger to his nose and sniffed.
No scent of poison or predators.
Sighing, Remo slipped into the pool feet first, knowing if there was something lurking in the pool he stood a better chance of survival if it bit off a foot and not his head.
The pool swallowed him. There was no light, of course-any more than there had been in the tunnel-but Remo's trained senses enabled him to feel his way down.
The pool led to a watery shaft, like a well. But it took a sudden horizontal jog and became an underground river.
Remo hesitated. He hadn't expected this. There was no way to tell if the river ran very far or not. Did he have enough oxygen in his lungs or not?
After a moment Remo decided to chance it. He swam south, the logical direction, keeping his movements to a minimum to conserve air and energy. There was a current, so he surrendered to it, knowing it would do most of the work for him. This helped conserve oxygen, too.
Remo knew when the tunnel ran out because he bumped his head. There was almost no warning. He couldn't see. There wasn't even any ambient light down here for his eyes to capture and magnify. The current had begun to slow. Remo had run out of tunnel.
Recoiling from the unexpected obstacle, Remo got reoriented and tried feeling for a way out. He found no shaft leading up. Nor one down, either.
There was a hole about the size of his hand in the end of the underground tunnel. The water was flowing on through that. But it was too small for a man, and when Remo attacked it with his fingers, he excavated a distance of about a foot, only to find the tunnel remained narrow as far as he could feel.
Treading water, he let the bubbles dribble from his mouth as he considered his next move. He might have enough oxygen to keep digging. Then again, maybe this wasn't the correct way.
In the end the low glow of fear deep in the pit of his stomach forced Remo to retrace his swim. He swam hard, against the current, using up precious air faster than he planned.
At the juncture below the shaft, he was forced to stop and think ahead. Go up and recharge his air or swim the other way?
He decided to go for the air.
When his head popped up at the top of the pool, he immediately sensed a presence.
Remo went very very still and let the sounds of the presence come to him.
The predominant sound was breathing-heavy, moist and brutish. He tried to resolve the darkness in the area where the thing hovered. It was impossible. There was nothing to work with.
So Remo closed his eyes. His energies redirected themselves toward his remaining senses.
The overall impression was of an upright being-a biped. But its heart action and working of the lungs was greater than that of a man. And the breathing was that of a brute.
The creature-whatever it was-snorted once, and Remo reacted as he was trained to. He went for the sound.
The thing, amazingly, retreated faster than Remo's thrust.
Remo came out of the water and moved in on it. Where the carotid artery pulsed more loudly than any other point in the circulatory system except the heart, Remo attacked. He employed a simple but effective blow. A lateral slice with the side of his hand.
The blow, designed to sever the head so swiftly the target never knew what hit him, was clean. So clean, Remo thought as the body fell with a surprisingly soft thud, that he hardly felt the strong muscles and cables of the neck give before it.
The head fell into his hands, and instinctively Remo snared it.
He discovered he had grabbed it by a thick, short horn and, startled, dropped the head. In his mind's eye, he visualized a bull's head.
But the thing he had killed was a biped. He decided to leave the corpse alone.
Filling his lungs to full capacity, Remo returned to the pool and swam north against the current this time.
It was a long swim and he began to tire. His oxygen held out, but he had been swimming half the-night. While he had reserves of strength to draw upon yet, the first tendrils of fatigue had insinuated themselves into his nerves and muscles. He sensed lactic acid accumulating in his muscles and willed his body to ignore the approaching fatigue.
More than a mile along, the tunnel began to curve. Remo used his hands to guide him, walking along the bottom of the tunnel the way he had seen the Aegean octopus do it earlier in the day.
The tunnel twisted in several directions, and only the magnetic crystals in Remo's brain-crystals present in most higher animals including man-enabled him to keep track of his polar orientations.
Remo found himself swimming in the same direction as when he had started along this branch of the cave when a fragment of loose, current-borne volcanic rock bounced off his shoulder.
Instantly all his senses went to full alert. Another tumbled past. And while he was wondering what could have disturbed solid rock without disturbing the water or setting off warning vibrations, Remo swam smack into a blank wall.
Damn! he thought, panic raising. He had maybe five minutes of good air left. Quickly he began feeling the rock.
Then there was a small hole, the size of a quarter in the end of the tunnel. Otherwise, it was a dead end.
A dead end and a fifteen-minute swim back to the pool where life-giving oxygen waited.
Remo thought fast. Maybe there was a branch trail. As soon as the thought came, he realized eddies in the current would have indicated a side tunnel. There was no side tunnel. He had struck another dead end. A complete dead end.
Two dead ends, and the Master of Sinanju had told him to follow the cave to its southern exit.
I must have missed it, Remo thought angrily. Smartass that I am, I must have gone right past it. But where and when?
With no hope of swimming back in time, his brain wrestled with the problem. What could I have missed? How could I have missed it? It's impossible.
Unless Chiun faked me out.
Three minutes of oxygen burning in his lungs, Remo began to consider the possibility that the Master of Sinanju had lied to him.
Can't be. He wouldn't do that. He said to meet at the exit. There has to be an exit. Remo visualized the Master of Sinanju pointing southward. And he was facing north. The other tunnel had pointed south.
Then a thought struck him. It came to him with a great cold clarity.
I'm on Crete. That thing with a bull's head was the Minotaur. I'm on Crete. This is the labyrinth. I'm on Crete.
And in his mind, the voice of Sister Mary Margaret came to him, telling him how Theseus used his wiles to find his way out of the minotaur's labyrinth.