Out Of The Silence by Erle Cox — Read

NATURE took her full toll of his weary body, and it was nearly nine next morning before Dundas kicked off his bed clothes with a hearty exclamation of dismay at his laxness. He awoke keenly alive to the possibilities of the day before him, and after hurrying through his domestic routine he made his way to the shed with a handful of tools. He fixed his lamp so as to give the best possible light, and then, by means of careful sounding, he marked out with chalk the area that rang hollow beneath his hammer, and which he finally estimated was about a foot square.

Before long, by working on one spot, he had penetrated about an inch, when, to his delight, a small hole, no larger than a pin's head, appeared. Once broken through, he found that the work of enlarging the opening became easier. The cement began to fly in larger fragments from the edge of the chisel. In about two hours he had enlarged the opening sufficiently to admit his hand, but in spite of his eagerness he refrained from a close examination of the interior. It was when lunch time arrived, and half the area that had been marked out was broken down, that he turned the light inwards only to meet with disappointment. One inch behind the cement was a metal plate that blocked his view. This, he found, was loose, but he could not remove it until he had cleared away the whole of the cement. If they had done nothing else, his difficulties had made him philosophic. He had come to recognise the fact that whatever the intelligence was that had created his discovery, that intelligence had so adjusted matters that the secret could not be lightly violated.