My initial surmise had proved all too correct. To return by the way we had come was impossible. To reach the top we should require to be hauled up by a rope. But, in order not to frighten the girl, I kept on trying to find a way to clamber aloft. And all the time I was thinking that, failing any other egress, those blackened mummies were to be our companions until....
At last, with torn hands and slashed boots, I climbed down again to where she sat.
"Oh," she exclaimed wearily, "there must be a way up! We can't stay here!"
She sprang to her feet and clambered up on the débris, peering aloft. I reached up and took her hand.
"We'll explore the cave and see if there's another way out," I said soothingly.
"And if there isn't...." she began. "Oh," she added hastily, "don't think me a coward, but I have such a horror of shut-in places. And you've altered so much since we came down here, your voice is so grave, it scares me. Oh, Desmond, we're not caught here for good....!"
"How you run on!" I said as cheerfully as I could. "God bless my soul, we're not at the end of our tether yet. There's certain to be another exit at the far end of the cave...."
There was an opening of sorts; for one of the first things I had done on landing in the subterranean chamber was to see what means of escape it afforded other than that by which we had entered. But it was a slit, a mere air-hole in the living rock which, to judge by a cursory examination, would scarcely afford passage for a dog.
I have been in some tight corners in my time and it has always seemed to me that the most frightening thing about death is not the prospect of death itself, but rather the realisation--and it usually comes upon one suddenly and without warning--of the inexorability of fate, the utter impotence of man to escape his destiny. And very soon after crashing down into the cave I had understood that our chances of escape were reduced almost to the vanishing-point.
We had no food, only water and air. Death by slow starvation awaited us unless we could attract attention and secure help. Clubfoot and his people might be willing enough, in their own interest, to rescue us. But what chance had we, immured in the bowels of the earth as we were, of letting him know where we were? And how was Garth to find us when the _Naomi_ came back?