‘Perhaps we can break down the door. Anyway, let’s go and see.’
With a despondent shake of the head Pipi turned about, and led them down a corridor at right angles to the one by which they had come to another open space. Giving a helpless shrug, he pointed to an ancient nail-studded door set in a low archway.
Gregory gave vent to a peculiarly blasphemous Italian oath that he used only in times of exceptional stress. The jemmy that Pipi was holding might have been a matchstick for all the good it would have been against such a door. Nothing short of dynamite would have burst its lock or forced it off its hinges.
The wave of evil fury that had rocked his mind was past in a moment. Swiftly he began to assess the chances of his being able to get Pipi’s keys himself. It meant going up three flights of stairs—back stairs that were unknown to him—finding a room somewhere at the opposite end of the house to the one he had occupied—a room that he had never entered—then in pitch darkness locating solely from its description the right drawer in a bureau or writing table, and finally getting safely back to the cellar again.
‘No,’ he decided. Pipi was no coward and if he, knowing the house from cellar to attic, would not take such a gamble, it would be sheer lunacy for him, to attempt it. The sulphur-laden air would overcome him and he would be choking his life out before he could even find Pipi’s room.
Yet, if they failed to locate the trap door, it could be only a matter of an hour or so and he would be choking his life out in his own blood outside in the street. Either way was going to be extremely painful, and he had an idea that asphyxiation would prove the more so; but it had the advantage that at least he would make sure of not falling alive into Grauber’s hands. And, after all, there was always the chance that by some miracle he might succeed in getting the keys.
Old Ciská had been peering uncertainly round her through the bluish haze. Now she muttered something to Pipi. Turning to Gregory he exclaimed excitedly, ‘She says this is it! That in the old days the beer cellar used to be here!’
The old crone was nodding her head up and down and pointing with a skinny finger to a wide embrasure about fifteen feet away between two great squat pillars that supported a vaulted arch. ‘She says that’s where the scantling used to run,’ Pipi interpreted, ‘and that the trap-door is in the corner by the left-hand pillar.’
Gregory was already staring in that direction; but instead of joy his face held a worried frown. In more recent years the embrasure had been used as a bin for empty bottles. Hundreds of them were stacked in it, six or eight deep and five feet high. To shift enough of them to get at the floor under any part of the stack was going to be a formidable task. In consternation he said, ‘Ask her if she’s certain—absolutely certain.’
Pipi put the question and, with a muffled cackle of laughter from behind her scarf, Ciská began to babble cheerfully. ‘She should know, even after all these years. Béla the pantry-man had brought her there when she was a girl, given her too much beer and tossed her petticoats over her head. Afterwards they came there often. Once they had nearly been caught by the cellar-master. It was then Béla had shown her the trap-door. He had pulled it up and made her hide crouching on the steps underneath it until the old boy had gone. Soon after that Béla had been taken for the war, and there had been a child. The old Baroness had been very angry and sent her to live in the country. But there had been plenty of fine fellows there. None of them were such lusty chaps as Béla, though …’
Cutting her short, Pipi told Gregory that he felt sure the old woman knew what she was talking about.
‘Come on then!’ Gregory flund himself at the left-hand end of the great stack of bottles and began to throw them into the farthest corner. It was gruelling work and terribly exasperating; for no sooner had a space a foot or so deep been cleared at the side of the pillar than more bottles from the centre of the stack rolled down into it. Soon the pile of bottles and broken glass in the corner threatened to block the passage, so they had to start another pile against the cellar door. Smoke was still seeping down from above through all sorts of unsuspected crannies and the atmosphere was stifling.
Five, ten, fifteen minutes had slipped by since they had left the courtyard. They were still only halfway down the stack, and fresh avalanches set them back every few moments. Gregory began to despair of reaching the floor before they were exhausted. Old Ciská laboured manfully, but Pipi suddenly left them, so Gregory feared he had been forced to throw his hand in. But Pipi returned carrying a bundle of new laths that had been cut for him to bin away the year’s making of Baratsch, and with these they succeeded in shoring up the bulk of the remaining bottles in the stack.
After that the work went easier, although Gregory was worried now that soon the courtyard would be getting so thick with smoke that Sabine would either faint from suffocation, or find herself compelled to break out with her servants into the street.
Sweating, half-blinded, and with throats like limekilns, they kept at it until the last dozen bottles in the corner where they were delving had been thrown aside. Gregory gave a grunt of relief and joy. They had uncovered a square stone slab with an iron ring in it.
Seizing the ring, he pulled with all this strength; but the stone would not yield. Pipi knelt down and jabbed fiercely with his jemmy at one end of it until the edge of the iron had entered the crack between the stones far enough to hold. Throwing his weight on the jemmy, he heaved. The stone lifted slightly. Another minute and they had it up. A draught of cold clean air hit them in the face. In great gulps they drew it down into their bursting, lacerated lungs.
For a few minutes they were too exhausted to do anything but crouch there, then Gregory said, ‘Pipi, tell old Ciská that if I ever get back to Hungary I’ll give her a pension for life. Take her up now, and bring down your mistress. And the torches and things Mario was going to collect for me.’
The wait for Sabine seemed interminable, but just bearable now that he had fresh air. When she arrived she was almost fainting, and being supported betwen Pipi and Mario. They said that except for Magda, who had remained with her mistress, all the other servants had found the smoke bearable no longer and gone out into the street.
The draught from the trapdoor speedily revived Sabine; but she drew back from its dark depths with an expression of horror. Mario handed Gregory a big torch and a canvas bag half full of other things. Gregory said to the two men, ‘I’ll never be able to repay you both for all you have done. Go up now and out into the street. When you are questioned tell everyone that your mistress and I decided that we would rather die in the palace than be handed over to the Gestapo; and that between us we swallowed the contents of a bottle of sleeping tablets.’
Switching on the torch, he shone it down in the cavity. Its beam showed a flight of crumbling stone steps that merged into darkness.
‘I can’t!’ gasped Sabine. ‘I can’t! We don’t know where it leads. We may never get out!’
‘Courage, darling, courage!’ Descending the first few steps, Gregory took her hand and drew her after him.
No sooner was her head below the level of the ground than Pipi and Mario shouted after them ‘May God keep you! Good luck! Good luck!’ then lowered the heavy stone into place.
They had escaped from the Gestapo and from Grauber; but, as the dank cold of the cave struck an instant chill into their bones, even Gregory’s heart quailed at the thought of what now lay before them. This uncharted escape route must hold many perils. If the Goddess of Fortune should turn her back, they might die there in the darkness under Buda hill.
18
In the Caves
The steps were only about eighteen inches wide, but they were steep and, as Gregory saw from the first flash of his torch, there were well over twenty of them. There was no rail to which to hold on either side. To the left a wall of rough hewn rock rose from them; to the right there was nothing—a sheer drop into unplumbed darkness. One stumble on those narrow stairs and, with nothing to clutch at, it w
ould mean a headlong plunge into the gulf below.
Warily, Gregory tested every step before putting his weight on it. The staircase was far older than the palace above it and had probably been made many hundred, perhaps even a thousand, years ago. In the course of time earth tremors and gradual subsidence had caused some of the steps to crack and loose corners to fall away from them. It looked as if, at any moment, pressure upon one might cause an avalanche, which would send himself and Sabine cascading to the bottom.
Sabine tried to drive from her imagination a picture of both of them with bruised bodies and broken bones, half buried beneath a great pile of stones down on the still-unseen floor of the cave. That picture was swiftly succeeded by another. Perhaps the staircase had no ending; its bottom half might already have fallen away. If the gap were too big for them to dare jump down into the cave they would then be forced to retreat: to fight their way again through that searing, blinding smoke, and, after all, fall into the hands of their enemies. But worse. Most ghastly thought of all. Perhaps the stone flag above them was so heavy that they would not be able to lift it from below. In that case these crumbling steps would become a terrible prison from which there was no escape at all.
To steady herself, she had a hand on Gregory’s shoulder. As terror flooded through her mind, her grip instinctively tightened. Then a flash of common sense told her that to press upon or encumber him would increase their danger. Exerting all her resolution, she took her hand away. Almost at once her courage was rewarded. With Gregory in front of her she could not see how far the beam of his torch penetrated, but it was now lighting the ground. Quickening his pace he stepped boldly down the last half-dozen steps, then turned, shone the torch on the lowest steps for her, and said:
‘Well, we’re over the first fence in having got safely down that lot.’ His hoarse voice came back in a strange hollow echo, while the torch made their shadows huge and menacing on the rock wall beside them.
Taking a grip on herself, she followed the beam of the torch as he shone it up and down and round about. They were in a large tunnel. It was about twenty feet wide and so lofty that the cone of light did not reach the arched roof overhead. The stairway, the top of which was now hidden in the darkness, was no more than an excrescence on one of the walls of the tunnel, which appeared to be of the same dimensions in both directions. The floor was uneven but free of boulders though littered here and there with loose stones. It was quite dry and sloped slightly downwards in the same direction as the steps descended.
Gregory set down the canvas bag that Mario had given him and examined its contents. In it there was another, smaller, torch, three new candles and four partially used ones, a whole new packet of a dozen boxes of matches, a slab of chocolate and a three-quarters full bottle of orangeade.
He felt that Mario had done them well. If used sparingly there was enough lighting material there to keep them going for far longer than they should need to find a way out of the caverns. Yet that might take several hours; so the chocolate and the orange squash had been an excellent thought. The latter particularly was most welcome and their sore eyes lighted up at the sight of it. Each of them had a couple of mouthfuls there and then. It ran down their parched and lacerated throats like nectar, and made them feel once more like human beings instead of half-kippered demons just emerged from the sort of Hell invented by the early Christians to frighten their less intelligent enemies—and later depicted so admirably by the elder Breughel.
After savouring this unexpected and wonderful refreshment they instinctively turned downhill. Gregory carried the bag in one hand and the torch in the other. He held it pointed forward and a little down and, in order to save the battery, flashed it only at intervals frequent enough to ensure that they did not walk into some obstruction or fall into a crevasse. Sabine held his arm, and now that she was on firm ground she felt far less fearful of unknown dangers. They spoke little as their mouths were still dry and their throats sore from the agonising effects of the smoke they had swallowed.
As far as they could judge, the tunnel retained the same proportions; but its slope steepened. Gregory felt sure that it was following the contour of the Buda hill, and that they were coming down towards the level of the Danube. He hoped he was right, as he thought it almost certain that the long-dead people who had fashioned these caves, or at least adapted them for the use of humans during an emergency, would have seen to it that there were several entrances along the banks of the river. His belief that they were approaching water level was born out by the fact that, as the beam of the torch struck the floor ahead, the stones on it began to shine slightly. Then the ground underfoot became damp and, after another ten yards, the torch showed water.
Coming to a halt, Gregory waved the torch from side to side, then shone it into the impenetrable murk ahead. What they saw filled them with consternation. There was not a ripple on the water but it stretched from one side of the tunnel to the other and as far before them as the beam of light carried. Apparently, unless they were prepared to swim, it barred their further progress completely, and in its absolute stillness there was something vaguely menacing.
Gregory flicked the torch out. Instantly the darkness closed in upon them like a pall. His voice came with an unconcern he was far from feeling. ‘This must be one of the underground lakes old Hunyi mentioned. We’d best turn back. There’s certain to be a way round it.’
Swivelling about they set off up the hill. Knowing now that there was no bad break in the floor of the tunnel where a minor earthquake had caused a geological fault to open and become a crevasse, Gregory now flashed his torch from time to time on the walls on either side. Before they had gone far it lit a flight of stairs similar to those down which they had come. Halting again, he said:
‘There must be a way out up there. It doesn’t matter into whose cellar we come out. It’s still the middle of the night and everyone will be asleep; so we should be able to walk out of the front door, or anyhow come out through one of the ground-floor windows, without being challenged. Come on; up we go!’
Cautiously but quickly, shining the light on each step ahead of him, he made his way up the stairs, Sabine following close behind. When he reached the top he handed the torch to her; then, stooping his head forward, and bending his knees, he raised his shoulders until they were firmly braced against the square stone immediately above him. Clenching his fists he heaved, endeavouring to straighten himself. The stone slab did not lift. He made another effort, and another; but although he strained, holding his breath for a full minute, it would not yield a fraction of an inch.
Panting slightly, he relaxed and looked back at Sabine. ‘Sorry. I’m afraid this one is stuck. Yours would have been too, if anyone had tried it from underneath before we loosened it with the jemmy. I expect most of those that haven’t been used for half a century or more will be. But don’t worry; we’ll find one that isn’t.’
With Sabine leading this time they made their way gingerly back down the long flight of stone stairs, then continued to retrace their steps up the slope. By flashing the torch along the walls now and again, in the next hundred yards they came upon two more flights of steps. The trap at the top of the first proved equally impossible to shift, but the second gave at the first heave.
Quickly, Gregory took the torch from Sabine and, keeping the heavy stone raised with one shoulder, shone the beam through the narrow opening across the floor of a cellar. Even as he did so he smelt smoke. Next moment the beam came to rest on a heap of broken glass and empty bottles. Failing to recognise the flight of steps down which they had first come, they had returned to the Tuzolto Palace.
For the time and effort wasted they at least had the consolation of knowing that if the worst came to the worst they could get out that way. That was, if they did not get lost and could again identify that particular stairway. As an aid to recognising it, when they were safely down they piled on the bottom step a little heap of loose stones.
Continuing on up the slope
, they found that the tunnel soon began to narrow and lose height; then it took a curve and just round the bend they came upon another shorter flight of steps. Gregory ran up them while Sabine held the torch but, as he now half expected, the stone in the roof of the cave above the top step was stuck fast.
A little farther on the tunnel ended, and a few minutes’ exploration showed that they had emerged into a large open space some eighty feet across and roughly oval in shape. Its ceiling was too lofty for the torch to pick up, and round the sides were openings to seven or eight other tunnels. Between two of these openings at the narrowest end of the oval the rock wall had been worked smooth, and about three feet up a large fan-shaped recess, roughly two feet deep, had been hollowed out in it.
As the light flickered over the recess Gregory noticed some ring-like marks upon the stone. Stepping nearer they made out the remains of an early wall fresco. The rings were haloes and below them could still be faintly seen the outline of the pointed faces of saints with huge flat almond-shaped eyes. Obviously it had once been an altar and the cavern used as a church, perhaps in the days when the infidel Turks were the masters of the city.
Somewhat to Gregory’s surprise, Sabine bobbed before it, as though it were an altar in a still used church. Next moment she turned to him and said:
‘Give me a candle, please: one of the whole ones. I want to light it to the Virgin.’
‘Oh come!’ he protested, as the echo of her voice died away. ‘No religious rites have been performed here for centuries; and it’s possible that later on we may need really badly the few candles we have.’
‘I can’t help that,’ she retorted. ‘Please give me one.’
‘Sabine, be sensible. We simply can’t afford to do this sort of thing. Down in this place candles are more precious than gold.’
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