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the pocket of his knapsack, but a wet spot on the canvas seemed to promise trouble. Sure enough, two of the bottles had burst in the fall. He pulled chunks of glass out of the sack and dropped them into cracks and crevices in the rock walls. He uncorked the other two bottles, handing one to the Professor, who wasn’t at all unhappy to see it.
    The ale was sharp and dry, just the thing under the circumstances. Jonathan was in the middle of pointing out that Selznak could have made a fortune as a brewer when he noticed that Ahab was gone. He and the Professor set out down the tunnel at a brisk pace, assuming that if he’d gone back up, they’d find him for certain on their return.
    Forty yards along, the tunnel took a sharp turn to the right, then ended at the mouth of a pit that dropped straight as a stone into the depths of the earth. At the brink of the pit, sniffing along, was old Ahab.
    ‘End of the line,’ Jonathan told the Professor in a relieved sort of tone.
    ‘Not at all,’ the Professor replied. ‘Look here.’ He pointed at what appeared to be iron rungs set into the stone walls of the pit. ‘And look at this.’ He ran his hands over long gashes cut into the rock. ‘This has all been hacked out. Widened, probably.’
    ‘So it has.’ Jonathan wondered whether the Professor was actually considering climbing down an ageless iron ladder into a dark pit a mile beneath the earth. ‘What sort of lunatic hauled a pick down here to break rocks, do you suppose? It reminds me of those Eastern madmen who carve whole cities into a walrus tusk. Takes them a lifetime.’
    ‘No one dragged a pick down here.’ The Professor ran his hands over the gashes in the rock. ‘They dragged it
up
here. Look at these marks. They were chopped in from below. Something crawled up out of this pit from below.’
    ‘Great,’ Jonathan said. ‘Selznak’s ancestors, no doubt.’
    ‘Well we’ve got to find out.’ Whereupon the Professor dropped a stone into the void. It struck after just a couple of seconds, exciting the Professor no end, but alerting Jonathan to the sad fact that he was about to follow the Professor deeper yet into the earth.
    ‘I’ll climb to the bottom of this pit,’ Jonathan agreed, ‘if the ladder goes that far. But that’s it. If the tunnel goes on beyond as it has, I won’t follow it. We’ve used almost half our oil, and we’re a good two hours farther away from getting out of here than we were in the cellar. In ten minutes we’d better be heading back there.’
    ‘Done,’ the Professor called, swinging a foot into the abyss. Jonathan ordered Ahab to stay put and clambered after the Professor, climbing down slowly with the lantern slung over his arm, its wire handle resting in the crook of his elbow. It was about twenty feet to the bottom of the pit. From there, the tunnel ran on.
    ‘This is it,’ Jonathan said. ‘This tunnel could go on for a hundred miles.’
    ‘Shine the lantern on ahead,’ the Professor said, paying no attention to Jonathan’s observation. ‘I think we’re here.’ And when they held the lantern out they could see, vaguely, something that looked like a door – a great, arched iron door sealing off the tunnel. ‘The door!’ the Professor shouted, striding up to it. ‘I knew there was a door.’
    There was, however, no handle on the door. Nor was there a keyhole. There was just a great iron slab of a door. No cracks were visible anywhere around the perimeter and no hinges showed along either side. The Professor thumped on it, but his fist striking it didn’t make any more of a sound than if he had struck the smooth granite of the tunnel wall.
    ‘Yes, this is the door,’ the Professor whispered as if fearing that something crouched listening beyond.
    Jonathan was struck with the humor of the situation – the Professor’s obvious delight at having found an iron slab at the end of a tunnel. He rapped on the door with the end of his stick. ‘Hello, monsters!’ he