The World and Thorinn

11 How Thorinn tried to fly without success, and built a bladder instead.

The fields around the city were full of wingmen, and so were the byres, orchards, sheds, and the towers themselves. Wingmen and women were everywhere, setting things to rights, cleaning, repairing, weeding, gardening. The towers were aswarm with them; the sound of their wings, many times multiplied, made a susurrant whispering. Thorinn put his head into a few of the rooms on the lowest level and found joiners joining, tailors sewing, weavers weaving. None of them acknowledged his existence by so much as a glance or gesture.

He climbed the well to the upper rooms, buffeted by the wind of wings that missed him by finger-spans, and searched until he found some of the children asleep in hammocks of woven cord. Their small faces were serene. "When will they wake up?" he asked the box.

"When all the signs that they come from another place are gone."

"But they did come from another place—they'll remember that, won't they?"

"The other place is just like this place."

"How do you know all that?"

"I don't know it, Thorinn, but it must be so, or all this would be senseless." The wingmen toiled by day and night; they never slept, and even when the sky was so overcast that Thorinn could not see his hand before his face, they seemed to need no artificial light. When Thorinn approached them out of curiosity, aiming his light-box at their faces, they turned as if half asleep, blinked at his light, then went back to their labors.

Thorinn had made himself a shelter in the grove near the town, disliking the idea of sleeping under the wingmen's roof, although he well knew that they could find him anywhere if they meant him harm. On the third morning, when he poked his nose into the pantries for something to eat, he heard the piping of tiny voices above: the children were awake.

He found them here and there, some at their lessons, some in a nursery, some following the wingmen and women about at their daily tasks. Unlike the wingmen, the children stared at Thorinn with frank curiosity. One of them tugged at a woman's garments and said something; the woman answered curtly and drew the child away.

"What were they saying, box?"

"I think the child was saying, 'Who is that person?' and the engine was saying, 'Never mind.' There is danger for you, Thorinn, if the engines believe you might harm the children."

"I, harm the children?" said Thorinn indignantly. Indeed, there was something about them that drew him: they were like the young of rabbits or mice, innocent, tender, and beautiful. Now that he saw them beside the wingmen and women, he could well believe that the adults were engines, and he wondered that he had not seen it before. The big wingmen had dull faces; they were like the bark-creatures animated by Snorri in the tale; the children were bright-eyed, full of life.

Now that the children were awake, the adults no longer worked day and night; they slept, or appeared to sleep, hanging head downward from the perches in their apartments. Cooks were busy in the kitchens where, instead of fireplaces or ovens, they had great heaps of rotted vegetable matter secured in wooden presses; and the heat from these, as Thorinn felt for himself by putting his hand near them, was sufficient to cook their food.

The children were of different sizes, the smallest so young that they were just beginning to learn to fly, the biggest perhaps four summers older. They followed Thorinn about, in spite of the attempts of the wingmen to prevent it, and two or three turned up so often that Thorinn learned to watch for their faces. The box spoke to them whenever there was opportunity, and after a few days it could tell Thorinn what they said.

"Where do you come from?" was their persistent question. Thorinn told the box to answer that he came from the sky, but this did not satisfy them. Once when he was prowling along the wall of the cavern west of the city, followed as usual by two children whom he called Sven and Ilge (their own names were unpronounceable), the children stopped him and pointed to a cleft in the rock, no wider than two fingers' breadth. "Here is where you come from," they told him.

"What, from that little hole?"

"It is too small now, but you were smaller before."

"I don't know what you mean. When was I smaller?"

"When you came out of the rock." Sven thrust his fingers into the cleft and pulled them out again, drawing his small hands apart as if to indicate something that emerged and grew. After a few more questions and replies it became clear that he thought Thorinn had really come out of the stone itself. "Like sap dripping from a tree?"

The child's face was merry. "Yes, just like that.

Naturally you do not remember; you had just come into the Egg."

"No, that was not what happened."

"Then," said Ilge, "how did you get into the Egg?" Thorinn hesitated, thinking of the cataract which could be seen in the distance from where they stood, but some obscure instinct made him lie. "From another crack," he said. He walked on, with the children fluttering about him. "But not a crack like that," he said. "A big one, a tunnel, like this." He held his arms out. The box seemed to be having trouble; it spoke, Sven answered, it spoke again. Ilge looked puzzled. She repeated Thorinn's gesture: "Like this? A crack? Where is there such a crack in the Egg?"

"Well, it is hidden."

Sven sniggered. "It must be well hidden."

"Someday I may show you."

"And in such a crack, there could be three Thorinns and not one."

"Oh, yes, and not three but hundreds."

"Hundreds!" Both children doubled over with helpless laughter, and fell into a leafy bush.

One morning he found the older children sitting in rows in a large room where a wingman in a yellow gown was making them repeat after him sentences which he read out from a book of reeds. Thorinn sat down and let the box tell him what they were saying; it seemed to be a fanciful account of the creation of the world. Presently he noticed that the wingman was speaking briefly, but the box at some length.

"Box, why is everything so much shorter when he says it?"

"In their language there are words which contain the meaning of several words together."

"How can that be? Tell me what he is really saying now."

"He is saying, 'Shéshiru fállana állishi hóloshen—' "

"No, I don't mean that, I mean what are the words that have several words in them?"

"Just now, when he talked about the shell of the Egg, he said, 'Shéshiru,' which means something that lasts a long time; then 'fállana,' meaning early life, then 'állishi,' meaning that time is what the sentence is about; then 'hóloshen,' of years; then 'shirishirishíri,' meaning dozens of dozens of dozens; then 'lun,' which means nine, then 'leshíren,' not yet—"

"But that's nothing like what you said before," Thorinn protested. "It doesn't even make sense. How can they understand each other?"

He forgot to listen to the box's reply, for the children were standing up, bowing to the yellow-gowned man, then marching out the door, glancing at Thorinn out of the corners of their eyes. He heard them take wing a few moments later, fluttering up and down the well.

He still had no idea how he could get through the cataract, even supposing he could reach it; but the first thing was to find a way of getting there. If the wingpeople could fly with their leathery wings, why not he?

In one of the workshops he found two pieces of tanned leather, supple and thin, each more than an ell wide and long. He spread them out on a table and cut them into triangles, each with thongs at intervals—a waste of good leather, but it saved him the trouble of attaching separate thongs to them later. He had contrived the triangular pieces so that he could attach them to his arms at wrist, elbow and shoulder, and to his legs at hip and knee; in this way, he thought, he could improve on the design of the real wings, which extended only to the waist, and make up for the lack of the tail and the leathery flap that went with it.

Standing in a meadow near the city, with an interested audience of children, he leaned forward slightly, raised his arms and lowered them with a strong movement. He felt a surge that lifted him off the ground. Encouraged, he repeated the movement again and again; he felt himself being propelled upward, but the world was tilting; he strove in vain to right himself; now he was looking directly upward at the sky, and now the ground smote him on the back.

After several more attempts, each ending in the same way, to the vast entertainment of the children, he concluded that there must be some reason for the wingmen's tails, although he could not see what it was, and he gave up the idea of flying.

Spring was now well advanced, the crops growing in the fields, the orchard trees in blossom, scenting the air with a powdery piercing sweetness. Drifts of petals rose into the sky when the wind blew. On five successive mornings the wingpeople stood outside the town to watch them; they sang and played music on bone flutes, then swarmed back into the towers.

Several times more he saw the river whipped by the wind into slender waves taller than a man, and he never ceased to marvel that so light a breeze could make the waves so tall. In a way he understood the symmetry of it, that because the water weighed so little the strength of the wind against it was greater: but what if the water weighed nothing at all—how high would the waves be then?

Caged and restless, he spent days wandering in the forest, searching the cliff wall for crevices, staring at the cataract. Somehow he must find his way through it—but then what? He was already too many thousands of leagues from the Midworld to hope ever to get back afoot. The moment he came to any shaft, the geas would force him to go down. It was frustrating to know that he had killed demons and survived many perils, and yet he could not escape the power of that one old man up in Hovenskar. Sometimes he thought he felt Goryat's eyes on him wherever he went: or perhaps not Goryat, but someone even more powerful, some old god crouching at the center of things, with his hands and eyes everywhere.

What if he gave himself no choice but to go up when he came to a shaft? If some engine were to carry him up as irresistibly as an engine had carried him down...

He came back to the thought of the engine the box had shown him, the bladder filled with a gas lighter than air, a basket suspended beneath it, himself in the basket, rising... Clouds were lighter than the air, else they would fall, and so was the smoke from a fire. The bladder could be held open above a fire so that the smoke went in; thus it would rise, but then how to make it come down again? In the normal course of things smoke never came down. Perhaps a hole could be pierced in the top of the bladder, with a cover over it; remove the cover, the smoke escapes, the bladder descends. One morning, surrounded by children as usual, he experimented with a bladder taken from the body of a horned forest animal he had killed the day before. The children watched in fascination as he kindled a fire of twigs, then set to work scraping the bladder clean, drying it, and tying off one end with a bit of cord. He spread the other end open with two crossed twigs and held it above the little fire.

"They want to know what you are doing now," the box said.

"Tell them I want to see if the smoke will make the bladder rise." The box spoke with them briefly and then said, "They say they will make it rise for you if you like."

"Tell them to be quiet." The bladder was growing plump in Thorinn's hands; it trembled, moved; he released it and it ascended slowly an ell or two over his head before it gently capsized in the air and came down again. The children were fluttering around in their excitement, ignoring the light drizzle that had begun to fall. One came to him and grasped his hand earnestly, speaking into his face. "What is she saying?" he asked.

"She is saying that you are a magician, the greatest in the egg. She asks that you bring her pet bird back to life."

"Tell her I know no such magic."

The box spoke; the child, with a sulky face, moved away. Thorinn was looking at the limp bladder. Evidently what it needed was a weight to keep it upright, so that the smoke could not spill out and be lost. After some thought he bent a twig into a circlet and tied it securely with cord; this served to weigh down the bottom of the bladder as well as to hold the mouth of it open. This time he used a smaller fire and held the bladder closer. The bladder filled very satisfactorily with smoke and rose a dozen ells in the air, to Thorinn's delight and the awe of the children; but after a few minutes it took on a wrinkled appearance, sagged, and began to descend. When he picked it up it was flabby; nearly all the smoke had escaped.

He tried again, and this time tied a cord tightly around the neck of the bladder above the ring as soon as it was filled; the bladder rose as before and stayed up much longer, but it came down again just the same. The children were as disappointed as he was.

He examined the bladder carefully for holes and found none; it must be that the smoke was escaping through the tied-off portion at the top, and perhaps through the bottom as well. This was a disappointment; if the smoke could not be kept in the bladder longer than that, the larger version he had in mind would be of no use even to escape from the cavern, let alone to get back to the Midworld. He untied the neck of the bladder and looked at it glumly. The inside of it was moist to the touch, although it had been dry before: had the smoke turned to water when it cooled? Then all the children wanted to feel the bladder too. One of them tugged at his arm and spoke earnestly.

"He says the fire should be attached to the bladder, then the bladder will keep going up," said the box. Thorinn opened his mouth, then closed it again. With a charred twig he sketched on the side of a stone, while the children clustered around to watch: here the bladder, here the ring to hold the neck open, and here, suspended from the ring, a basket for the rider. Now, inside the basket, a fire pot lined with clay or earth: the fire ascends with the bladder, and as long as it burns the smoke cannot cool and turn to water; therefore the bladder stays aloft. But the basket can carry only so much wood to burn; when that is gone, down comes the bladder.

Thorinn fed more twigs to the fire to keep it from going out in the light drizzle. The air shimmered over the embers; flakes of white ash rose, wavered, and fell, yet there was no wind. Thorinn struggled with a thought: suppose it was not the smoke at all, but the air heated by the fire, that made the bladder rise?

At all events, he must begin to plan now for a bladder big enough to carry him and his possessions: how big must it be? The box was of no use: "That depends on the weight of the bladder and the lifting power of the air." When Thorinn asked what the lifting power of air was, the box replied, "That depends on how hot it is, and how hot the air around the bladder is."

"How am I to find that out?"

The box showed him a picture of a slender rod of glass, with marks on it and a thread of silver inside.

"This is an engine for measuring how hot a thing is."

"But where am I to get such an engine?"

"I don't know, Thorinn."

So it was evident that he must do it himself, and in truth he was rather glad of that, for when he asked the box's advice it always told him more than he wanted to know and more than he could understand, whereas when he worked a thing out for himself, no matter how difficult it was, at least when he was done he understood it.

That afternoon he made weights by cutting a stick into little pieces of equal length, and by attaching one after another to the neck of the bladder, determined how much it could lift when it was filled with hot air. He also found out by accident that he could measure equally well and much more easily by attaching a long cord to the bladder: then it rose until the lifting power of the air inside it exactly matched the weight of the cord which it raised from the ground.

From these studies Thorinn concluded that the height of the bladder ought to be at least eight times his own height in order to bear him and his belongings aloft. That meant a bladder sixteen or seventeen ells tall, much bigger than he had imagined it would be. He was tempted to make it smaller and therefore easier, but if it did not raise him, the work would be all for nothing. Because the bladder must bear its own weight as well as his, he wanted to make it as light as possible, and for this reason he gave up his first intention of making it out of pieces of leather or cloth; instead, he pieced it together out of the thin, parchment-like stuff the wingpeople used for interior walls and screens. Aided by Sven and Ilge, he cleared a space in one of the largest workshops and took what he needed. Presently the wingpeople brought more wall-stuff to replace what he had taken; when he needed more, he took that as well.

One morning he came upon Sven and Ilge in the workshop trying clumsily to fit a whittled stick into the hollow of a reed. Between amusement and sympathy, Thorinn explained to them through the box that both shaft and plunger must be perfectly round, or the fire stick would not work. Their grey-furred little faces were so earnest and trusting that he could not leave it at that, although he was impatient to get on with his own task. He found a good rod of hardwood in the wingmen's stores, for a plunger, and showed them how the shaft must be made in two halves carved to fit around it, then slowly tightened as the plunger was turned between them with wet sand to grind the pieces to a perfect fit, and finally glued together with an end-piece shaped to leave a hollow for the tinder. He left them toiling earnestly and clumsily at the task; he doubted that they could accomplish it, but at least they were happy in trying. He made his bladder in six sections shaped like a fish, each twenty ells long and nine ells wide. Under his direction, the children joined the pieces that made up each section with fish-glue, and hung the sections up to dry in the well. When that was done, Thorinn brought the sections back into his workroom, which in the meantime the wingpeople had begun to use again for their own purposes: he cleared out their benches, jars, and other rubbish, spread the sections on the floor, and began gluing the edges together. It proved exasperatingly difficult to make the flat pieces form a round shape without wrinkling or buckling, but after many failures he got the whole bladder assembled. He painted it all over with fish-glue, dried it again, and at last carried it outside for trial. Children trooped out after him. It was a still gray day. Thorinn unfolded his bladder and hung it from a cord stretched between two trees, with the neck about three ells from the ground. He made a ring of a bent sapling and secured it inside the neck. Beneath it he laid dry brush and branches in criss-cross layers, and kindled a fire. Flames curled up; smoke poured into the open neck of the bladder, and presently it began to fill. To Thorinn's disgust, a moment later there came a patter of raindrops in the trees and on the suspended limp bulk of the bladder. A gust of wind blew sparks slanting away from the fire; then the patter increased to a stuttering roar; water swept across the clearing in veils and torrents. Thorinn retreated to shelter until the rain stopped; by that time the fire was out.

Thorinn sent the children for dry wood. They found it without delay; the ground was dry only a few hundred ells distant. Thorinn built another fire and lighted it. After about the same interval, it rained again and put the fire out.

Thorinn saw then that whoever ruled the world, whether it was gods, demons, or even engines as the box seemed to think, they did not want him to inflate his bladder today. But he was loath to take it down, dry it and fold it, and put it away indoors, only to take it out again tomorrow. What if there were a roof over the bladder and the fire, to keep the rain off while the bladder filled? Such a roof would take him the rest of the day to build, and then it would be in the way when the bladder rose... But why not use the bladder itself as a roof?

He cut a pole a little less than three times his height, measured the bladder with it, cut it again, and used it as a measure to cut another the same length. He trimmed and whittled the ends carefully to roundness, so that they should not puncture the bladder. Leaping up with the first pole through the open neck, he managed to get it crosswise at an angle; then hanging from it and pulling the fabric of the bladder down, he adjusted it until it was level. He did the same with the second pole, crosswise to the first. Now the bladder was spread at four points to its full width of about seventeen ells, although it was hollow between. Thorinn built a third fire.

As he had more than half expected, it rained again. Now the spread bulk of the bladder sheltered the fire, although the rain smoked and streamed all around it. The hollow places between the poles began to fill out; watching from his place under the tree, Thorinn thought he saw the bladder straining upward. Exultantly, he took a step forward. While he was still in midair, there came a shattering crack and a white glare. Thorinn tumbled into the underbrush, blinded, stunned, and deaf. When he picked himself up again, the children's cries were receding in the distance and the bladder was in flames. Yellowish smoke was pouring from the fire; presently it went out. The rain continued, turning the fire into a soggy pile of ash. What was left of the bladder hung by its cord from a single tree; the other was split and slivered at the base, as if it had been struck by a mighty hammer; bits of the white wood lay scattered all over the clearing.

Thorinn sat looking at the ruins of his work. He felt a sudden elation, and realized after a moment what it was about: he knew a way to get up through the cataract.

"Box, if it should rain here so long that the valley is flooded, will the waterfall keep on flowing or will it stop?"

"It will stop, Thorinn."

So it must be; the rulers of the world, whoever they were, could not be expected to take such care of their subjects, only to let them drown in a flooded cavern. Now his way was clear.

Only two panels of the bladder had been ruined by the lightning, which had run down them like a crooked river, burning away a channel nearly a span in width and leaving the edges blackened. Thorinn made new panels, fitted them into place, glued and dried them.

In one of the workshops he found a basket adequate for his needs: it was round, nearly two ells broad, and two spans deep. For a firepit he brought clay from the riverbank and formed it like a deep dish in the center of the basket, leaving a space half an ell broad all around for himself and his possessions, including the firewood and kindling he must take with him. The basket had four handles by which he meant to suspend it; for this purpose he knotted together a rigging to fit over the inflated bladder. He attached a long cord to the top of this rigging, and eight shorter ones at the bottom which he brought together and fastened to the four handles of the basket. He also cut some pieces of wall-stuff to use as patches in case the bladder was damaged.

Now he had to consider how to defend himself if he should be attacked by an engine in the tunnels. He filled bags of flimsy paper with pitch and bound them to the tips of the stoutest arrows he could find. The bags burst and splattered when they struck a target, but he was not yet satisfied. What he wanted was something to entangle the limbs of the engine. He thought of sticky cords bursting out of the bag—but if they were sticky, what was to keep them from clinging together?

He began again, using fishing lines which he coated with pitch and then coiled inside the bag. But the bursting of the bag did not carry them far; something else was needed. He thought of springes, and began to make small circlets of sapling branches, tied together with the thinnest thread. He fastened stone weights to the ends of his fishing lines and coiled them so that the weights lay against the ends of the circlets where they were joined. After many trials he discovered how to mix the pitch with just enough water and fish-glue to make the lines fly apart when the thread broke. In the end he had in each bag a complicated construction of three sapling-rings, each with its coiled and weighted cord, each set in a different direction. When he fired it at a tree, the sticky lines whipped out in all directions and tangled themselves among the branches.

He prepared ten of these pitch-arrows, and in addition took a quiverful of the ordinary kind. Now he was almost ready. "Box," he said, "show me what way the engine brought me down into the cavern."

In the crystal appeared the outlines of a slanting tunnel. It forked, and one passage went steeply up while the other continued at the same pitch for a little space before it turned upward and became a vertical shaft. A tiny dot descended this shaft, moved down the slanting tunnel, and disappeared.

"Show me where the water runs."

The first fork and the stem of the Y filled with shimmering blue. "And that second shaft?" Thorinn asked, pointing. "Where does it go?"

The outlines drifted downward in the crystal. The shaft rose through a vast space and continued upward. At the far end of this space there were other shafts.

"What is that, another cavern like this one?"

"It is a cavern smaller than this one, and it is different in other ways."

"Are there men in it?"

"No, only engines."

Thorinn frowned. "Show me these engines."

In the crystal, he was looking into a cavern full of confusing shapes. An engine drifted by, then another. They paused, touched the side of one of the huge shapes that rose around them, then went on, for all the world like bees gathering pollen. They did not look at all like the engine that had captured him before.

"Box, will they harm me?"

"No, Thorinn."

"And that shaft in the ceiling, where does it go?"

The view traveled upward, the lines shrank together, and he was looking at another maze of passages, shafts, and tunnels. "Will it take me back to the Midworld?"

"Yes."

How much of this could he believe? The conviction had been growing on him that the box was not to be trusted, and that if it had another chance to betray him it would do so. Well, he would see. Early the next morning, before the children were awake, he collected all his belongings, including the tightly wrapped bladder with its basket, and set out for the upper end of the cavern He built himself a little shelter of branches near the cavern wall, within sight and sound of the cataract, and lay there that night. On the following day he began cutting poles for a shed ten ells long, eight high, and four wide. He planted the poles on rising ground above the river, and lashed other poles to them to make a peaked roof. He thatched the roof with bundles of branches to the thickness of half an ell. In the middle of the space covered by the shed he dug a firepit, and on either side he stacked dry wood from the forest. Then with his sword he cut through the trunks of four trees, forming a rough oblong around the shed, at a height of fifteen ells. He notched the stumps and cut the logs into pieces six ells long, which he raised with much toil, using a rope and a tripod of poles, and set into place at the ends of the oblong; he notched these in turn, and now cut more logs fourteen ells long, which he laid across the structure to form a solid flat roof above the peaked roof of the shed; and with leather thongs filched from the wingmen's workshops, he lashed the whole structure firmly together. All through this work, which occupied him fourteen days, the air was cloudless.

On the fifteenth day he built a fire in the pit and touched it off. The flames mounted; smoke poured up under the roof, and Thorinn retreated to the shelter of a nearby tree. Presently the rain began; first a patter, then a steady hammering in the leaves above. Thorinn shut his eyes and waited. There was an earsplitting crack and a white glare that he could see through his eyelids. When he looked, he saw that the log roof above the shed was splintered but unbroken. The rain continued in a steady torrent. After a time, without warning, there was another lightning-stroke and a clap of thunder; again the roof was splintered—he could see the white spears standing up at all angles above it—but it held. The thatched roof beneath was not even touched.

Thorinn watched until the rain began to spatter from the overloaded leaves of the tree above him. He ran to the shed, stayed there long enough to bank his fire, and ran back drenched to his shelter near the cliff. All day long the rain continued, and at intervals peals of thunder rolled down the valley and the sky was lighted with a violet glare. Toward evening Thorinn pulled his shirt over his head for a cloak and went down to the river. It was swollen and white-capped, twice as wide as before. He went back to the shelter, ate his evening meal, and fell asleep to the drumming of rain in the treetops. Sometime during the night he woke up realizing that the sound had stopped. He ran to the shed and found that the fire had gone out, although the shed was intact and dry. He built the fire up again, waited as before until it was burning well, then banked it, and went back to bed. In the morning the river was a surging brown flood. Thorinn ventured out to the shed, found the fire low, and built it up once more. The log roof was a mass of splinters from the repeated lightning-strokes, but the splinters themselves, as he had hoped, made a roof almost as good for his purpose as the original. The river sprawled wider, creeping almost visibly up the slope; by now, Thorinn thought, it must be almost to the wingmen's towers.

His stacks of wood were dwindling. Thorinn kept the fire going as charily as possible, and watched the river. On the following morning it was halfway up the slope; farther down he could see trees standing up out of it like marooned people. By now, surely, the water must be in the middle stories of the towers. For the first time he began to doubt what he was doing. Would the invisible watchers really let the wingpeople's farms be flooded, their buildings swept away? He banked the fire again and went to bed, but it was long before he was asleep.

In the morning he awoke knowing that something had happened. He listened: the roar of the cataract had changed its note. He tumbled out and peered upward. Was the stream thinner, or was it his imagination?

In a moment he was sure. A last white plume came majestically down the wall; above it he could see the dripping black hole in the stone.

Thorinn's instinct was for haste, but he made himself take the time to build up the fire again, then to assemble all his belongings into one compact bundle to be strapped on his back. He had decided against trying to inflate the bladder here and use it to reach the exit; in the first place, it would take too long, and second, he might drift up out of reach of the wall. Instead, he had brought with him a pot of pitch and two of the wingmen's brushes. Hanging the pot from his belt, he dipped one of the brushes now, slapped it against the stone, and pulled himself upward. As the sluggish weight of his bundle was drawn into motion, his task became easier; he tugged one brush free, dipped the other, and slapped it against the stone above his head.

He angled toward the hole in the wall as he went; he could see the interior now, still glistening with moisture, and a few thready streams of water that fell over the lip to join the drifting raindrops. The ground dropped away below him, blurred by rain. Here was the hole above him; he hauled himself up, grasped the lip and pulled himself over.

He sat up, gasping and triumphant. He was in a slanting tunnel twenty ells high, with rounded walls worn smooth by water.