steadily to the.right down the invisible trench worn by decades of footsteps.
Thirty feet down the corridor the liquid stopped and pooled, slimed with patches
of dust that broke up the reflected lamplight.
Samlor examined with particular care the plaques just beyond the pool of urine.
The seeming music was louder here. He set his knife-point against one of the
hexagons and touched his forehead to the butt-cap. Clearly and triumphantly
rolled the notes of a hydraulic organ, played somewhere in the complex of
tunnels. Samlor sheathed the knife again and sighted along the stones
themselves, holding the light above his head. The polished surface of one waist
high plaque had been dulled ‘by sweat and wear. Samlor pressed it and the next
hexagon over hinged out of the wall.
The plaque which had lifted was only a hand’s breadth thick, but what the lamp
showed beyond it was a tunnel rather than a room: the remainder of the wall was
of natural basalt columns, twenty feet long and lying on their sides. To go
further, Samlor would have to crawl along a hole barely wide enough to pass his
shoulders; and the other end was capped as well.
Samlor had spent his working life under an open sky. He had thus far borne the
realization of the tons of rock above his head only by resolutely not thinking
about it. This rat-hole left him no choice … but he would go through it
anyway. A man had to be able to control his mind, or he wasn’t a man …
The Cirdonian set the lamp on the floor. It would gutter out in a few minutes