The Saint Meets His Match (She was a Lady)

The passage sloped steeply downwards, and the last ten yards were almost precipitous. He descended them gin­gerly by the aid of well-worn crevices in the stone paving that must once have been another flight of steps, before they had been worn away into mere ridges in a steep slope.

The roof of the passage, which had been low at the beginning, did not descend with the slope. It remained at its old level, so that the space above his head became loftier as he went down. At the foot of the slope the passage took a sharp turn. He rounded the corner and found himself suddenly in the place that Essenden had described as "a sort of cave." It was certainly a sort of cave, but of a sort that the Saint had never expected to find in such a place. Where he entered it the roof was not very high, and the light from the last of the row of bulbs which had led him there illuminated it. But of the extent of the cavern he could not judge. It stretched away be­yond the rough semicircle of illumination, its ultimate depths of darkness dwarfing the light at that one end. He spoke a few pointless words with some idea of testing the dimensions of the cave, and the echoes of his voice rever­berated backwards and forwards with a wild and swelling intensity until they almost deafened him, and then gradually rolled and rattled away into the bowels of the earth. And when the echoes had stopped, in the utter silence and loneliness of the place, he had no inclination to burst into tears because his instructions did not com­pel him to penetrate any farther into that gigantic crypt.

He turned. The aperture through which he had come seemed now, in perspective with the rest of the place, to have a puny and insignificant appearance, like a mouse hole in a cathedral wall; but on the right of the entrance he found what he had been told to look for. In the centre of the wall of the cave, about a dozen feet apart, were two sets of chains hanging from iron staples cemented into the rock. He was to look between these.

He went forward. At the foot of the cavern wall, be­tween the wall and himself, ran a kind of dark stream, about four feet wide. Standing on the edge of this, he was able to see, in the wall opposite him, a flat square slab like a flagstone let into the natural rock—exactly as he had been told he would find it.

With a sigh he retired a few paces, removed his shoes and socks, and turned up his trousers. Then he stepped delicately into the dark, ice-cold water.