When he had the fire going he took his flashlight and went across the room and disappeared down a narrow passageway. Ballard made his way by damp stone corridors down inside the mountain to another room. Here his light scudded across a growth of limestone columns and what looked like huge stone urns moist and illshapen. From the floor of the room an underground stream rose. It welled up blackly in a calcite basin and flowed down a narrow aqueduct where the room tailed off through a black hole. Ballard's light glanced from the surface of the pool unaltered, as if bent back by some strange underground force. Everywhere water dripped and spattered and the wet cave walls looked waxed or lacquered in the beam of light. He crossed the room and followed the stream out and down the narrow gorge through which it flowed, the water rushing off into the darkness before him, descending from pool to pool in stone cups of its own devising and Ballard nimble over the rocks and along a ledge, keeping his feet dry, straddling the watercourse at points, his light picking out on the pale stone floor of the stream white crawfish that backed and turned blindly. He followed this course for perhaps a mile down all its turnings and through narrows that fetched him sideways advancing like a fencer and through a tunnel that brought him to his belly, the smell of the water beside him in the trough rich with minerals and past the chalken dung of he knew not what animals until he climbed up a chimney to a corridor above the stream and entered into a tall and bellshaped cavern. Here the walls with their softlooking convolutions, slavered over as they were with wet and bloodred mud, had an organic look to them, like the innards of some great beast. Here in the bowels of the mountain Ballard turned his light on ledges or pallets of stone where dead people lay like saints.