were not frescoed. They smoked their own names under an overhanging
shelf and moved on. Presently they came to a place where a little stream
of water, trickling over a ledge and carrying a limestone sediment with
it, had, in the slow-dragging ages, formed a laced and ruffled Niagara
in gleaming and imperishable stone. Tom squeezed his small body behind
it in order to illuminate it for Becky s gratification. He found that
it curtained a sort of steep natural stairway which was enclosed between
narrow walls, and at once the ambition to be a discoverer seized him.
Becky responded to his call, and they made a smoke-mark for future
guidance, and started upon their quest. They wound this way and that,
far down into the secret depths of the cave, made another mark, and
branched off in search of novelties to tell the upper world about. In
one place they found a spacious cavern, from whose ceiling depended a
multitude of shining stalactites of the length and circumference of
a man s leg; they walked all about it, wondering and admiring, and
presently left it by one of the numerous passages that opened into
it. This shortly brought them to a bewitching spring, whose basin was
incrusted with a frostwork of glittering crystals; it was in the midst
of a cavern whose walls were supported by many fantastic pillars which
had been formed by the joining of great stalactites and stalagmites
together, the result of the ceaseless water-drip of centuries. Under the
roof vast knots of bats had packed themselves together, thousands in a
bunch; the lights disturbed the creatures and they came flocking down by
hundreds, squeaking and darting furiously at the candles. Tom knew their
ways and the danger of this sort of conduct. He seized Becky s hand and
hurried her into the first corridor that offered; and none too soon, for
a bat struck Becky s light out with its wing while she was passing out
of the cavern. The bats chased the children a good distance; but the
fugitives plunged into every new passage that offered, and at last got
rid of the perilous things. Tom found a subterranean lake, shortly,
which stretched its dim length away until its shape was lost in the
shadows. He wanted to explore its borders, but concluded that it would
be best to sit down and rest awhile, first. Now, for the first time, the
deep stillness of the place laid a clammy hand upon the spirits of the
children. Becky said:
Why, I didn t notice, but it seems ever so long since I heard any of
the others.
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