“I ’t go in there, I ’t！ I ’t！ I won’t,” she pahe Earthmen said nothing but they all lowered their spears and poihem at her.
“Steady, Pole,” said Puddleglum. “Tho big fellows wouldn’t be crawling in there if it didn’t get wider later on. And there’s ohing about this underground work, we shan’t get any rain.”
“Oh, you don’t uand. I ’t,” wailed Jill.
“Think how I felt on that cliff, Pole,” said Scrubb. “You go first, Puddleglum, and I’ll e after her.”
“That’s right,” said the Marsh-wiggle, getting down on his hands and knees. “You keep a grip of my heels, Pole, and Scrubb will hold on to yours. Then we’ll all be fortable.”
“fortable！” said Jill. But she got down and they crawled in on their elbows.
It was a nasty place. You had to go flat on your face for what emed like half an hour, though it may really have been only five minutes. It was hot. Jill felt she was being smothered. But at last a dim light showed ahead, the tunnel grew wider and higher, and they came out, hot, dirty, and shaken, into a cave se that it scarcely emed like a cave at all. It was full of a dim, drowsy radiance, so that here they had no need of the Earthmen’s strange lantern. The floor was soft with some kind of moss and out of this grew many strange shapes, branched and tall like trees, but flabby like mushrooms. They stood too far apart to make a forest; it was more like a park. The light （a greenish grey） emed to e both from them and from the moss, and it was not strong enough to reach the roof of the cave, which must have been a long way overhead. Across the mild, soft, sleepy place they were now made to march. It was very sad, but with a quiet sort of sadness like soft music.
Here they pasd dozens of strange animals lying ourf, either dead or asleep, Jill could not tell which. The were mostly of a dragonish or bat-like sort; Puddleglum did not know what any of them were.
“Do they grow here?” Scrubb asked the Warden.
He emed very surprid at being spoken to, but replied, “No. They are all beasts that have found their way down by chasms and caves, out of Overland into the Deep Realm. Many e down, and few return to the sunlit lands. It is said that they will all wake at the end of the world.”
His mouth shut like a box when he had said this, and in the great silence of that cave the childrehat they would not dare to speak again. The bare feet of the gnomes, padding on the deep moss, made no sound. There was no wind, there were no birds, there was no sound of water. There was no sound of breathing from the strange beasts.
When they had walked for veral miles, they came to a wall of rock, and in it a low archway leading into another cavern. It was not, however, so bad as the last entrand Jill could gh it without bending her head. It brought them into a smaller cave, long and narrow, about the shape and size of a cathedral. And here, filling almost the whole length of it, lay an enormous man fast asleep. He was far bigger than any of the giants, and his face was not like a giant’s, but noble aiful. His breast ro and fell gently uhe snowy beard which covered him to the waist. A pure, silver light （no one saw where it came from） rested upon him.