Explore "In Caverns Below" by Stanton A. Coblentz on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
For a long, blank moment of dismay and horror, I stood staring out across that deserted passageway. I was as one who, in mid-ocean, suddenly feels the waves foaming over him with no sign of a rescuing sail. Not until this instant had the full terror of my plight overwhelmed me; not until this instant had I felt utterly hopeless and helpless. Now that Clay was gone, it was as if the very under-pinnings of my world had been torn from beneath me.
Yet my alarm was not for myself. It was of Clay that I was thinking; it was Clay's tormented face that flashed before my mind as if surrounded by a red glare of danger. And the conviction came to me, irrational yet irresistible, that he had either been slain or was in mortal peril.