Caves have always had the most extraordinary, magical fascination for me.  When I was a child, I believed that if I could only go into one I should be allowed to find fairyland; and even in an ordinary, every-day cellar I was never quite without hope.  The smell of a cellar suggested the most cool, delightful, shadowy mysteries to me, at that time, and does still.

It was as if the ghostly hand that had been pulling me back, begging me not to leave Les Baux, led me gently but insistently through the doorway of the rock house.

It was not yet dark inside.  I tiptoed my way through some rough bits of debris, to the back of the big room, crudely cut out of stone.  There were shelves where the dwellers had set lights or stored provisions, and there was nothing else to see except a square hole in the floor, below which a staircase had been hewn.  A glimmer of light came up to me, gray as a bat’s wing, and I knew that there must be some opening for ventilation below.

I felt that I would give anything to go down those rough stone stairs, only half way down, perhaps; just far enough to see what lay underneath.  It was as if Taven herself had called me, saying:  “Come, I have something to show you.”

I put a foot on the first step, then the other foot wanted a chance to touch the next step, and so on, each demanding its own turn in fairness.  I had gone down eight steps, counting each one, when I heard a faint rustling noise.  I stopped, my heart giving a jump, like a bird in a cage.

There were no windows in the underground room, which was much smaller and less regular in shape than the one above, but a faint twilight seemed to rain down into it in streaks, like spears of rain, and I guessed that holes had been made in the rock to give light and ventilation.  Something alive was down there, moving.  I was frightened; I hardly dared to look.  And I had a nightmare feeling of being struck dumb and motionless.  I tried to turn and run up the stairs but I had to look, and the gray filtering light struck into a pair of eyes.

CHAPTER XIV

They were great black eyes, sunken into the face of an old woman.  She stood in a corner, and it occurred to me that she had perhaps run there, as much afraid of me as I was of her.  No eyes were ever like those, I thought, except the eyes of a gipsy.

“What are you doing?” I stammered, in French, hardly expecting her to understand and answer me; but she replied in an old, cracked voice that sounded hollow and unreal in the cavern.

“I have been asleep,” she said.  “I am waiting for my sons.  We are in Les Baux on business.  I thought, when I heard you, it was my boys coming to fetch me.  I can’t go till they are here, because I have dropped my rosary with a silver crucifix down below, and the way is too steep for me.  They must get it.”

“Do they know you are here?” I asked.