"Rotten luck, son," he croaked. "Sorry to disappoint you, but I don't want to die to-day."
Then in the nebulous light which permeated the clammy atmosphere, he turned to examine the possibilities of further progress. He had heard of such caverns as this, and knew that parts of the country were honeycombed with a vast network of such subterranean natural excavations. Some of these caves went further than even the most intrepid had ever dared to explore them: he remembered a story he had heard about Cheddar Caves, of a party which had set out to investigate a certain tunnel and had never returned, and he recalled how his fertile imagination had been fired with visionings of strange prehistoric beasts surviving in the bowels of the earth, and perhaps a race of semi-human beings similarly entombed, and how he had resolved one day to go in search of the lost explorers. But that would have been with all the armoury he wanted, suitable companions, ropes, and torches.... This, however, was not Cheddar, and he had nothing but his soaking clothes and the few things in his pockets. Yet, since there was no retreat toward the water, he must go the other way. He was certain that he had been carried too far down the stream for there to be any hope of a search party getting in touch with him.
Behind him what he had thought was simply the ledge proved to be a low gap in the face of the rock. He crawled a little way in, and felt again the helplessness of being without the flashlight which he ought to have had with him in any case. Still, it wasn't any use crying about it you couldn't weep luminous tears so the only thing to do was to carry on and hope for the best.
A distinct draught chilled his face as he wriggled along in the pitchy blackness, and his hopes began to rise again, tentatively. If the air circulated freely, it meant that somewhere there must be an outlet, and the grim doubt was whether, when he found it, it would prove to be an outlet he could use.
It was a vague sort of consolation to find that his wrist watch, which was guaranteed to stand any amount of rough handling on land or sea or air, had stood up to this last test. It was still ticking smoothly, and he could time his laborious progress by the luminous dial. The floor of the tunnel seemed to be practically level, and long-forgotten eroding waters had worn it flat and eaten the jaggedness off the irregularities which had survived, so that worming along on his stomach was not so arduous as it might have been. Once he cracked his head against a wall of rock right in his path, and so found that the passage took a twist to the right. After that, he felt his way gingerly, and thus circumnavigated the subsequent windings uninjured. Always he made sure that the air blew on his face, and by that means he saved himself the expenditure of much time and energy on following up a side branch which must have been a blind alley. He went on like this for over an hour, and at the end of that time, raising himself slowly to his feet, he found that the roof had receded far enough to allow him to proceed upright, which was an improvement.
Still he felt his way forward very carefully with feet and hands, for he had no desire to step over the edge of a small precipice or run his head against a sudden dip of the rock above. He kept one hand on the wall to steer by and worked patiently on.
The darkness had that pitchy intensity which torments the eyes and rasps the nerves to a shrieking rawness. He understood then as never before the full agony of blindness. Queer flashes of crimson rocketed across his sight, and the strain of transferring all his reliance to his sense of touch was working him up into a quivering torment of fraying ganglions. There was a terrible desire to sink down on the stone and crawl aimlessly about till sleep and forgetfulness came. Then this was replaced by the struggling of a childish terror to unthrone his reason and set him pounding helpless fists against the rock to rush madly into the blackness till he crashed against another wall and was flung broken and screaming to the ground to give up the attempt altogether and stand raving and cursing this false blindness, praying recklessly for the relief of death. For all the darkness that cloaks the world under the sky is as dazzling sunshine to the awful numbing terror of the darkness in the places under the earth where there has never been light since the beginning.
But the Saint slogged on, though toward the end he scarcely knew what he was doing, and his pace grew slower and slower, jerky and automatic, till it stopped altogether. Then he would drive himself forward again. Then he would find that he had come to a standstill again, and the routine would be repeated. Wild snatches of all the songs he had ever heard burst from his dry lips and boomed and reechoed crazily about his ears. Once he was deafened with a harsh roar of eerie, discordant laughter, and was only half conscious that it cackled from his own throat. He found that he chattered and babbled foolish, meaningless strings of words, and here and there in his madness sentences from widely separated conversations stood out with ridiculous clarity in the senseless jumble. And each time he caught himself giving way to these forerunners of insanity he stopped and lashed himself back to trembling silence. He grew careless of his safety. Sometimes he ran as though fiends pursued him; then he would crash against an obstacle and fall headlong, and there he would lie and wrestle with himself till he could rise and go on again. He reeled and thudded against the wall, and went on he stumbled and tripped and fell, and went on he was aching with a hundred bruises, but still he went on ... on ... on.... Sometimes he blasphemed, sometimes he prayed. But yard by yard he advanced; and always, high and safe above the maelstrom of breaking nerves, he had before him the one guiding beacon which could possibly bring him out of that hell alive to fight on and on and keep that draught of clean, fresh air blowing squarely in his face.
The strength of an unfaltering will to live drove him on when tearing muscles cried for rest. He could no longer see his watch: when he tried to look at it, the figures and the hands whirled and jazzed before his eyes in a dizzy tangle which he had lost the power to control. But hours had ceased to mean anything in that Stygian emptiness there was no time, no anything but pain and madness. Always there was that impenetrable darkness, clinging, pulsating, palpable. It wound sinuously about his limbs and tried to hold them it looped a noose round his chest and tightened it it thudded on his temples and seared his eyes swelled in upon him till he seemed to be ploughing through a tenuous liquid, and yet when he hit out and strove to break away from its grip it thinned away and let him go, only to swathe him round again in an instant. It stuck in his throat like a fog, curling ghostly, evil fingers caressingly about his face. He thought of Light, Light, Light of glowing coals and the leaping flicker of campfires, of the pale, mystical light of the moon and the dim, dusty light of stars, of searchlight beams and the headlights of cars, of the sizzling white glare of arc lamps. He thought of all great lights of the merciless blaze of eye-aching tropical suns flaming over amethyst desert skies. But there was only the darkness... . And he toiled on....
***
And then ahead of him was no longer darkness.
He had turned a corner of the passage, staggering round a buttress and falling heavily over a boulder which he saw but had not the strength to avoid. And as he lay on the ground, sore and weary to death, he saw that the rock about him was picked out with the faintest of faint silver lights. He wondered if this were madness at last if his eyes had been won over to the Enemy and were joining in the derision of his defeat if his vision had been seduced to refining his torture with hallucinations of victory. Slowly, fearfully, he raised his head.