Before the light dimmed, they both turned toward the cleavage in the wall they had seen a few minutes earlier. “I’d just like to take a look inside,” Pitch said. “We can spare the match.”

As the match burned out Steve followed Pitch, his hand upon Pitch’s shoulder. Their fingers touched the wall and felt along it to the opening they were seeking.

“Now,” Pitch said, lighting another match.

They stood just within the room, but as the match flared, then steadied, they backed away, startled at what they saw before them. It was a long narrow room with a ceiling no higher than the tunnel. Along the bottom of the wall were iron rings and fastened to each was a short chain—chains that were still around bones that once had been the wrists of many men. Grotesquely, their skeletons still remained sitting upright, their white skulls leaning wearily against the wall. And with the flickering of the match they seemed to move horribly.

Pitch dropped the match and, frantically, he and Steve groped their way through the darkness of the outer chamber until their fingers found the opening leading to the tunnel. Outside they hurriedly turned left, knowing that was the direction from which they had come. They ran until their legs gave way beneath them, then slipped wearily to the floor and lay there in the darkness.

It was a few minutes before Pitch struck a match, and within its glow their faces were still white and taut.

Pitch said almost angrily, “We were very silly to run. We have to be more careful or we’ll lose our way.”

Yes, Steve admitted to himself, it had been silly to run as they had done. Yet one often did things without thinking. This had been one of those times. He was not ashamed, for he knew that many men braver than he or Pitch would have had a similar reaction to the horrible sight of men who centuries ago had died a living death, chained to the walls of a black pit hundreds of feet beneath the ground.

Soon they started again and found that going up the tunnel was easier on their legs than coming down. At regular intervals Pitch would light a match, and from its glow they would look ahead for the other tunnels they had passed on their way down. Then, as the light flickered and died, they would walk forward again until they came to what they figured had been the range of their last light. They would stop then to light another match before going on.

After more than half an hour Pitch said gravely, “Something must be wrong, Steve. I’m certain we should have run across other tunnels before this. I remember marking one just fifteen minutes or so before we reached the chamber on our way down.”