Since he sat with his back to me, he didn't notice that I was still there. From the safety of his hiding place, he had seen his pursuers loping onward, and because he probably had forgotten how to count in the confusion of the chase, he probably thought that he had shaken us all off. Without looking around, he got up clumsily and waddled as cool as a cucumber diagonally across the garden to where two walls came to a corner half hidden with ivy, long-bladed grass, and common shrubs. He slipped into this impenetrable vegetation and vanished.
Well, no matter how exhausted I was, I wasn't about to give up now after having gone through all that frantic hullabaloo. So I leaped down from the wall and approached the thicket cautiously. Lo and behold, there in the undergrowth, ideally camouflaged by the ivy, was hidden a slight, nondescript opening, the mouth of a pipelike tunnel. From its mouth resounded the echo of scratching and scuffling noises my predecessor made. Presumably, the tunnel went down to the sewers or to some other underground installation.
I gave it little thought. The way things looked, I faced two possible deaths. If I didn't follow his trail, then I would probably burst with curiosity right then and there, and if I did follow his trail, the mass murderer would buy me a one-way ticket to the hereafter. I finally decided to die the second way, since the first one seemed a much greater torture.
After I had forced myself through the opening, I discovered that the secret passage was an extremely narrow, quadratic shaft, apparently carved out of basalt. The inner walls were crusted with dirt, moss, and the indefinable deposits of time. Whatever purpose the passage served or might once have served, it looked as if it had lain hidden under the earth for centuries. It was very stuffy down there, and I only made creeping progress, trying with all my might to fight off fits of claustrophobia. Nothing more could be heard of the mysterious Persian. Obviously he had already reached the end of the shaft. Although the ominous tunnel went down on an incline, at the beginning I had to struggle, because the drop was very slight. After a while, however, the passage sloped down so precipitously that, although I desperately tried to brake my descent, I ended up sliding down at high speed. This torture lasted a pretty long time, and continual contact with the sides of the shaft no doubt made me both look like a chimney sweeper, and stink to high heaven. And then all of a sudden I didn't feel anything anymore under my paws and was free-falling.11
I crashed down into a tiny, tublike chamber, which looked like the inside of a Moorish dome chiseled out of stone and turned upside down. It was gloomy in this place, but a little light shone through a vent to my right and enabled me to orient myself.
Once again trapped, I had no other alternative but to prepare myself for a further excursion, although my yearning for adventure was now greatly diminished. It was certain that I would soon happen upon the butcher, who doubtlessly knew his way around this labyrinth much better than I, and first he would ask me what time it was and then he would eat me alive in one big gulp. Like any intelligent living being endowed with an imagination, I had often speculated on how I would depart from this life and had reveled in the most bizarre visions. I had not realized that the final act in every life always unfolds shabbily, if not in abject poverty. So this was how smarty-pants Francis would breathe his last. Missing under the earth, in a cold, dark cavern, in the stinking jaws of a Persian half-breed, also known as "The Waddler." Sure, many would grieve. Gustav more than anyone else. He would cry his eyes out after my sudden departure, that is, disappearance, and would spend the following weeks in bed in misery. But the pain would gradually recede; the wounds of memory would close. And—who knows?—maybe as soon as two or three months later someone else would be eating from my bowl, letting himself be scratched behind the ears by "my best friend" and farting in sheer pleasure. What had that honorable zombie Deep Purple said in my delightfully eerie dream? This is the way of life, this is the way of the world!
What a dumb beast I was! What was I doing here anyway? With that question, I did something I had never done: I yielded to resignation. Whether out of weariness or incipient senility, I was not sure. But it was obvious that all the upsetting, horrifying events I had gone through were beginning to change me, make me into someone else. Cost what it may, I had to admit this to myself, and the remedy for this insidious sickness could only be a hearty "Keep your chin up! Pull yourself together! Show some courage!"
My heart pounding in fear, I passed through the vent and into a dark corridor that seemed in keeping with what I suspected this place to be. Apparently I had landed in an underground system of graves, in a sealed catacomb. To be honest, my surprise was not all that great, a result of the fact that the only thing that I share intellectually with Gustav is an enthusiasm for archaeology. How often I had sat for days at a time poring over fine reproductive volumes and historic studies on relics, kingdoms, and cultures that had long ago died out. It was hardly a wonder,
