Traitors' Gate (39 page)

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.

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 would 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.’

‘All the more reason we should donate one to the Holy Mother, and secure her protection,’ came the swift response. ‘You must give me one for her, Gregory! You must!’

Her voice had risen to an hysterical note; so, with considerable reluctance, Gregory got out from the bag one of their precious candles and a box of matches. Taking it from him she set it up in the embrasure, lit it, and knelt for a moment in prayer. Then, taking his arm, she said in a normal voice:

‘I feel much happier now. Look at our shadows. Aren’t they weird? Which way shall we try next?’

The lack of success with which they had so far met in endeavouring to force up stone flags in cellars decided Gregory that their best hope still lay in finding an entrance to the caves somewhere along the river bank; so they set off down the slope of a tunnel next to that from which they had emerged.

After ten minutes’ walk they were brought to a halt; the tunnel ended as had the first, with its floor shelving into the underground lake. While going down the tunnel they had noticed several more stone stairways at its side, and on their way back Gregory went up three of these; but his efforts were wasted. It struck him now that probably very few of them any longer led into cellars that were in use. In the past five hundred years the great majority of the palaces above must have been rebuilt, and the replacement of timbered mansions by ones of stone would have required more solid foundations, so many of the old cellars would have been filled up with rubble and concrete.