As Mary had slept most of the day she had a thoroughly bad night. For hours she tossed and turned in the narrow bunk, trying to think of some way in which she could get a warning of the Great Ram's intentions to the Swiss authorities; so that, even if they were not in time to stop him launching the rocket, they could at least evacuate the town of Saanen and its surrounding district. Yet she knew that such mind-searching was utterly futile, because up there in the cave she was as completely shut off from the outside world as if she had been on a desert island in the Pacific. At length she fell into a half-sleep made hideous by nightmare visions of collapsing walls, houses in flames, and screaming, terrified people. Finally her mind became a blank for a couple of hours, but when she was woken by the Chinese cook she had the impression that she had been asleep for only a few minutes.

A quarter-of-an-hour later she joined Wash and Mirkoss at breakfast. They had been up since before dawn working on the rocket, and as soon as they had finished eating they returned to it. Knowing that the Great Ram would be with them, so she need have no fear of suddenly coming face to face with him, she decided to explore the cave.

She found it to be a good two hundred yards in length, curving round to another entrance at its far extremity. Tiptoeing forward to within about forty feet of the opening, she stood for some minutes watching the activity going on there. To one side there was a stack of what looked like oil drums, to the other an open shed housing a glowing furnace at which Mirkoss was hammering on a piece of white-hot metal. Outside in the centre of a broad rock platform lay the rocket, half hidden by a cluster of upright steel girders, a derrick with heavy lifting chains, a pumping apparatus and all sorts of other paraphernalia, among which the Great Ram and Wash were working.

Turning, she made her way back more slowly, exploring as she went the shallow sheds that lined the walls of the cave. Some contained stores of various kinds, including a big cache of tinned food, others were sleeping cabins; and one was obviously the Great Ram's work room, as it had maps pinned up on its walls and contained a table-desk and filing cabinets.

In several places between blocks of two or three sheds there were lower tunnels running in at right angles to the sides of the big one. She cautiously explored them in turn, to find that some of them had pieces of machinery in them. They were all quite short and ended abruptly in a sloping rugged surface; so she thought it probable that most, if not all, of this big hole in the mountain owed its existence to mining operations which had later been abandoned.