going down pretty steadily and keeping in the same direction in spite
of a twist and a turn or two. There were passages leading off to the
side every now and then, as he knew by the glimmer of his sword, or
could feel with his hand on the wall. Of these he took no notice,
except to hurry past for fear of goblins or half-imagined dark things
coming out of them. On and on he went, and down and down; and still he
heard no sound of anything except the occasional whirr of a bat by his
ears, which startled him at first, till it became too frequent to
bother about. I do not know how long he kept on like this, hating to
go on, not daring to stop, on, on, until he was tireder than tired.
     Suddenly without any warning he trotted splash into water! Ugh! it was
icy cold. That pulled him up sharp and short. He did not know whether
it was just a pool in the path, or the edge of an underground stream
that crossed the passage, or the brink of a deep dark subterranean
lake. The sword was hardly shining at all. He stopped, and he could
hear, when he listened hard, drops drip-drip-dripping from an unseen
roof into the water below; but there seemed no other sort of sound.
     
     Still he did not dare to wade out into the darkness. He could not
swim; and he thought, too, of nasty slimy things, with big bulging