Tom Tiddler's Island, стр. 27
“Um!” said Colin, in a rather crestfallen tone. “Method doesn’t pan out so well, after all? Then what next?”
“Cross to the other side of the corridor, keep your left hand on the wall there, and start off in the same direction as before. But wait a jiffy till I get this thread untied and reeled in. No use in wasting any of it.”
When the thread had been recovered and re-anchored, they set out once more. Two right-angled turns brought them to the mouth of the new corridor which they had already seen; and with his left hand on the wall, Colin entered it. A few paces farther on the passage turned to the left, led straight on for some twenty yards, and then bent again to the left.
“All right angles, so far,” Colin pointed out unnecessarily. “Now to the right again. Plain sailing this: only one road and no side-galleries. Now to the left. Hello! Blank wall ahead. Must be a transverse corridor at the—— Good Lord! This is a bit thick!”
His downward-deflected light had revealed a yawning chasm blocking the end of the tunnel and taking the place of his supposed transverse corridor. He advanced gingerly to the verge and threw his beam into the pit.
“I say, you know, this is a bit steep,” he ejaculated rather incoherently in his first surprise.
Northfleet gazed down into the pit.
“A sheer drop, as you say,” he agreed, with wilful misunderstanding. “Very neat.”
“This is a bit more than I bargained for,” Colin complained. “Just suppose we had blundered down here in the dark, what?”
“I expect the designer had just that very notion in his mind,” Northfleet surmised in a cheerful tone, which Colin rather resented. “I wonder did they come down now and again to dig their prisoners out of the mousetrap, or did they just leave them till they passed in their checks? Not much chance of unauthorised visitors getting into the old castle by this route; and if they happened to come in force, this would be the very place to hold them up. Callers with visas on their passports would get helped with ropes, I suppose. It must be twenty feet deep at least; so even if one man stood on another man’s shoulders, he couldn’t get out. Besides, a simple stranger would probably fall flop into it and be so damaged that he couldn’t climb at all. So far as we’re concerned, it’s a case of getting a ladder down here before we can go on. A rope’s no good—no projections to tie it on to in these passages. Nuisance, isn’t it?”
“Do you want to go on?” Colin inquired, rather tepidly.
It was all very well to start out to explore a secret passage, he felt; but when the exploration revealed things like this pit—with perhaps worse traps in store—and when further progress meant hauling a ladder through the windings of the labyrinth, the affair lost its attractions. Still, as he recognised, it would be rather feeble to abandon the business at the first check.
“There won’t be any man-traps or spring-guns,” said Northfleet reassuringly, as though he had read Colin’s thoughts. “Craigmore’s workmen would have found them when they came down to wall up the other end, and the Dinnets would have told you about them.”
“I suppose so,” Colin agreed in a half-hearted tone.
He put the best face that he could on the matter, however; and after some trouble they procured a ladder and succeeded in getting it down to the pit. By its help they descended into the chasm, after Northfleet had tested the air with burning paper.
Once down, Northfleet transferred the ladder to the farther side of the pit, propping it against the blank wall, and ascended until he got hie head above the floor-level. Then with his flash-lamp he examined the walls.
“The tunnel we came down by is the middle one of three, all ending at the pit’s edge,” he reported. “Which of the other two should we try first?”
“We want to get away from the centre, don’t we? Try the outside one,” Colin suggested.
“The westerly one? Right!” Northfleet descended, and shifted the ladder into a fresh position. In a minute or two they were in the new tunnel.
“Stick to the left-hand wall again?” Colin asked. “Then, here goes!”
Twenty feet down the new corridor came a right-angled turn; and on rounding this they found themselves in a cul-de-sac. Retracing their steps, they climbed down into the pit and ascended into the third tunnel. Once more Colin took the lead, his left hand on the wall, while Northfleet payed out the guiding thread and halted at each fresh turn to make careful notes! The ladder hampered them badly, as they had enough to occupy their hands; but it could not be left behind, lest there were other pits ahead.
Colin’s initial zest had worn off. The lowness of the roof overhead, the straitness of the corridors, the continual turnings and windings of the rectangular system, the trouble of easing the ladder round awkward corners: all began to have their adverse influence upon him. He soon lost all count of direction; and the apparently aimless meanderings of the passages irritated him almost as much as the waste of energy involved in wandering into culs-de-sac and emerging again where he had gone in. Gradually there came a feeling that he was cut off from the daylight, buried under tons and tons of rock and earth. In his normal life Colin was something of a “fresh-air fiend”; and he became resentfully conscious that he was not cut out for this mole-like type of exploration.
Northfleet’s methodical procedure added to his vexation. At intervals, Colin was left in charge of the ladder and the thread, while Northfleet, taking the lamp with him, explored some side-gallery. These spells of enforced