When they had crossed, they seemed at first as far off from the cave’s mouth as ever; but, after ten minutes’ groping about, they got into a zigzag crack in the great step, through which, with more tearing of clothes and bruising of shins, they managed to wriggle up to the sloping platform above. They had learnt wisdom from experience, and did not try to strike right across it. Perhaps you have tried to walk right across a common in a fog, and have come out not far from the place you started from: well, Donald and Harry had discovered that making short cuts in the pitch-dark Cave of the Red Hand was like that, and so they tapped along the edge of the step until they came to the cave’s wall once more, and then followed that—running up against rocks, and floundering into mud and water as before—until they got to the foot of the next step. When they had climbed a good way up the last step they had to mount, they met with a great disappointment. There were no more stones sticking out for them to take hold of. They swished the stick backwards and forwards like a scythe, but it went over the rock just as if it had been a brick wall.
So they had to go back and try again, and it was so long before they found a mounting-place, that they began to lose heart, and fear that, after all, they would have to die in the cave, with nothing but the pointing red hand at the entrance to show where they were. But at last their heads rose above the edge of the great step, and there, far away, the moonlight was pouring in at the cave’s mouth, and making silver gauze of the mist just inside. Close by them the cave still looked very gloomy; but oh, how jolly they felt! When the owls and the flying foxes brushed against Harry now, he could have shaken hands—or wings—with them, they seemed so much like old friends welcoming him back to life.
It did not take the boys long to get out of the cave when they had the moonlight to guide them, and they did not stop long to look at the inwards-pointing red hand, at which they had looked so curiously when they were going to follow its direction. Then the faded red fingers seemed burnt up by the blazing sunlight; now they pointed dim beneath the dewy moonlight. When the boys thought of the dismal darkness the hand pointed to, they hurried by it as if it had power to push them back into the gloom. In spite of their hobbles, Cornstalk and Flora M‘Ivor had strayed a long way, and it was early Sunday morning before they and their riders got back to Wonga-Wonga.