again, tentatively. If the air circulated freely, it meant that somewhere there must be an outlet, and the grim doubt was whether, when he found it, it would prove to be an outlet he could use.
It was a vague sort of consolation to find that his wrist watch, which was guaranteed to stand any amount of rough handling on land or sea or air, had stood up to this last test. It was still ticking smoothly, and he could time his laborious progress by the luminous dial. The floor of the tunnel seemed to be practically level, and long-forgotten eroding waters had worn it flat and eaten the jaggedness off the irregularities which had survived, so that worming along on his stomach was not so arduous as it might have been. Once he cracked his head against a wall of rock right in his path, and so found that the passage took a twist to the right. After that, he felt his way gingerly, and thus circumnavigated the subsequent windings uninjured. Always he made sure that the air blew on his face, and by that means he saved himself the expenditure of much time and energy on following up a side branch which must have been a blind alley. He went on like this for over an hour, and at the end of that time, raising himself slowly to his feet, he found that the roof had receded far enough to allow him to proceed upright, which was an improvement.
Still he felt his way forward very carefully with feet and hands, for he had no desire to step over the edge of a small precipice or run his head against a sudden dip of the rock above. He kept one hand on the wall to steer by and worked patiently on.
The darkness had that pitchy intensity which torments the eyes and rasps the nerves to a shrieking rawness. He understood then as never before the full agony of blindness. Queer flashes of crimson rocketed across his sight, and the strain of transferring all his reliance to his sense of touch was working him up into a quivering torment of fraying ganglions. There was a terrible desire to sink down on the stone and crawl aimlessly about till sleep and forgetfulness came. Then this was replaced by the struggling of a childish terror to unthrone his reason and set him pounding helpless fists against the rock — to rush madly into the blackness till he crashed against another wall and was flung broken and screaming to the ground — to give up the attempt altogether and stand raving and cursing this false blindness, praying recklessly for the relief of death. For all the darkness that cloaks the world under the sky is as dazzling sunshine to the awful numbing terror of the darkness in the places under the earth where there has never been light since the beginning.
But the Saint slogged on, though toward the end he scarcely knew what he was doing, and his pace grew slower and slower, jerky and automatic, till it stopped altogether. Then he would drive himself forward again. Then he would find that he had come to a standstill again, and the routine would be repeated. Wild snatches of all the songs he had ever heard burst from his dry lips and boomed and reechoed crazily about his ears. Once he was deafened with a harsh roar of eerie, discordant laughter, and was only half conscious that it cackled from his own throat. He found that he chattered and babbled foolish, meaningless strings of words, and here and there in his madness sentences from widely separated conversations stood out with ridiculous clarity in the senseless jumble. And each time he caught himself giving way to these forerunners of insanity he stopped and lashed himself back to trembling silence. He grew careless of his safety. Sometimes he ran as though fiends pursued him; then he would crash against an obstacle and fall headlong, and there he would lie and wrestle with himself till he could rise and go on again. He reeled and thudded against the wall, and went on — he stumbled and tripped and fell, and went on — he was aching with a hundred bruises, but still he went on ... on ... on.... Sometimes he blasphemed, sometimes he prayed. But yard by yard he advanced; and always, high and safe above the maelstrom of breaking nerves, he had before him the one guiding beacon which could possibly bring him out of that hell alive — to fight on and on and keep that draught of clean, fresh air blowing squarely in his face.
The strength of an unfaltering will to live drove him on when tearing muscles cried for rest. He could no longer see his watch: when he tried to look at it, the figures and the hands whirled and jazzed before his eyes in a dizzy tangle which he had lost the power to control. But hours had ceased to mean anything — in that Stygian emptiness there was no time, no anything but pain and madness. Always there was that impenetrable darkness, clinging, pulsating, palpable. It wound sinuously about his limbs and tried to hold them — it looped a noose round his chest and tightened it — it thudded on his temples and seared his eyes — swelled in upon him till he seemed to be ploughing through a tenuous liquid, and yet when he hit out and strove to break away from its grip it thinned away and let him go, only to swathe him round again in an instant. It stuck in his throat like a fog, curling ghostly, evil fingers caressingly about his face. He thought of Light, Light, Light — of glowing coals and the leaping flicker of campfires, of the pale, mystical light of the moon and the dim, dusty light of stars, of searchlight beams and the headlights of cars, of the sizzling white glare of arc lamps. He thought of all great lights — of the merciless blaze of eye-aching tropical suns flaming over amethyst desert skies. But there was only the darkness... . And he toiled on....
***
And then ahead of him was no longer darkness.
He had turned a corner of the passage, staggering round a buttress and falling heavily over a boulder which he saw but had not the strength to avoid. And as he lay on the ground, sore and weary to death, he saw that the rock about him was picked out with the faintest of faint silver lights. He wondered if this were madness at last — if his eyes had been won over to the Enemy and were joining in the derision of his defeat — if his vision had been seduced to refining his torture with hallucinations of victory. Slowly, fearfully, he raised his head.
He could see all the cave in which he lay — the height and the length and the breadth of it. The light was so dim that it hardly amounted to more than normal darkness, but after the appalling blind blackness in which he had wandered for so many hours it was as startling a contrast as the rising of the sun after night. Almost sobbing with thankfulness, he dragged himself to his feet and went reeling on. There was another bend about fifty yards ahead, and at that corner it seemed as if the light was a little stronger. He reached the angle of rock and stumbled around it in a torment of apprehension lest after all he should have been deceived. But before him lay a short stretch of widening cave, and at the end of that showed a great rough-hewn opening. And through that opening he saw the blessed sky — an infinitely deep and clean blue evening sky sprinkled with merry, winking stars.
Somehow he reached the opening and saw all the glory of the radiant night, the jewelled heavens above and the quiet sea below. He stood and gazed, supremely happy, marvelling at all these | things as a man might do who had seen none of | them before and would see none of them again.
'Oh, God!' said the Saint in a breathless whisper.
Then he sagged limply against the wall and slid down to the ground in a dead faint.
It was three hours before he opened his eyes again, though this the Saint did not know. He had fallen in the entrance of the cave, and he was awakened by the light of the rising moon shining across his face. Slowly he opened his eyes and gazed unwinkingly into the round white luminous disk that was heaving itself out of the sea. A memory of the nightmare of blindness through which he had passed seethed horribly across his half-consciousness, and he sprang up with a cry. The movement roused him completely, and he found himself leaning against the wall with his heart thudding like a triphammer and his breath coming in short gasps. He smiled crookedly, collecting himself. He must have had it badly! Never before had he passed out like that.
He waited, gathering his wits and trampling the aftermath of the nightmare. It was then that he looked at his watch and found that it was half-past eleven. The rest had revived him — the crazy muzziness had gone from his head, and he felt his strength welling back in great refreshing waves. Elbows and knees were grazed and sore, his knuckles were skinned, tender bumps were coming up all over his skull, and his entire body throbbed like one big bruise, but this was where his strenuous training stood him in good stead: so great were the recuperative powers of his matchless constitution that already he was stretching his limbs experimentally to see whether he could honestly certify himself fit and tuned up for the next round.
And gradually the awareness of a singular noise began to percolate his brain, and that noise was the faint, clanking, chugging noise of machinery. He stiffened, and turned his head. The sound faded away into silence, and he wondered if his ears were playing him tricks and he was hearing nothing but the singing of his own battered cranium. Then that gentle rattling started up again — only the muffled phantom of a bated whisper of a noise, but quite unmistakable to the Saint.
He looked out, and blinked incredulously.
The island called the Old House lay in the quiet sea below. A little farther out a long, lean, black shape rode at anchor, picked out in delicately stippled high lights where the moon touched it — a picture to rejoice the heart of an artist or a seaman. And presently, while Simon watched, the tinkle of the engine stopped again. In a moment a small boat shot out from under the shadow of the ship's hull and began to pull swiftly over to the island, and at the same time another boat emerged from behind the Old House and worked over toward the motor ship. The boat
