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238 ought to be the safest place when that explosion happens."

"Something in that!"

"Got any matches?" Barcus inquired.

"Never one."

"Nor I. We'll have to feel our way along. Let me lead. If I step over the brink of a pit or anything, I'll try to yell and warn you in time."

Alan caught his friend's hand and pressed it warmly, a caress eloquent of his gratitude to Barcus for taking their peril lightly, or pretending to, for the sake of Rose.

A ticklish business, that—groping their way through blackness so opaque that it seemed palpable. An elbow in the tunnel—sensed rather than felt or seen—cut them off from direct communication with the bulkhead, and at the same time opened up a shaft of daylight striking down through that pitchy darkness like a column of gold.

Cries of joy choking in their throats, they gained the spot immediately below the shaft, and looked up dazzled, to see blue sky, like a coin of Heaven's minting, far above them, at the end of a long and almost perpendicular tunnel, wide enough to permit the passage of a man's body, and lined with wooden ladders.

The end of the lowermost ladder hung within easy reach from the floor of the tunnel. But even as Alan