First they had to cross a pool, not deep, but splashy and unpleasant.
Then more perilously they made their way along the edges of the water,
walking carefully upon the slippery stones, wet with the clammy,
contracted breath of the cave. Soon, however, the cavern opened out into
a wider and drier place, till they seemed to be fairly under the mass of
the island; for the cliffs, rising in three hundred feet of solid rock
above their heads, stretched away before them black and grim to the
earth's very centre.

Anna cried out, "Oh, I cannot breathe! Let us go back!"

But the undaunted Simeon, determined to establish his masculine
superiority once for all, denied her plumply.

"We shall go back none," he said, "till we have finished this candle."

So, clasping more tightly her knight-errant's hand, Anna sighed, and
resigned herself for once to the unaccustomed pleasure of doing as she
was bid.

Deeper and deeper they went into the cleft of the rocks, stopping
sometimes to listen, and hearing nothing but the beating of their own
hearts when they did so.

There came sometimes, however, mysterious noises, as though the fairy
folks were playing pipes in the stony knolls, of which they had both
heard often enough. And also by whiles they heard a thing far more
awful--a plunge as of a great sea-beast sinking suddenly into deep
water.