For Gregory this possibility meant a chance of life and freedom, and for Sabine escape from the threatening attentions of the Gestapo. He did not attempt to keep the excitement out of his voice, as he cried:
'In the cellars! But where? Could you find it?'
Hunyi shook his head. 'No, Herr Commandant. But Pipi might know where it is.'
Sabine called to Pipi to leave the hose to the footman and come over to them. Quickly they questioned him; but he could not help. He knew of the caves but had never heard his father speak of an entrance to them from the Tuzolto palace.
Gregory's heart sank again. If it was there they should be able to find it. But since its existence was not even known to Pipi it would need careful looking for, and in the cellars of a large building like the palace such a search might take hours.
Rushing from place to place, their hasty conferences, and the wear and tear from constant fits of violent coughing made them feel as if the smoke bomb attack had been going on all night; but, in fact, it was less than half an hour since Pipi had given the first alarm, and there was a quarter of an hour still to go before it would be one o'clock. Given normal conditions, two or three hours should have proved enough to locate the trapdoor. But conditions in the palace were not normal. The rooms on its main floors were now pitch black caverns, and Gregory knew that by this time enough smoke must have seeped down into the basement to asphyxiate anyone who remained there without a mask for more than ten or fifteen minutes.
Nevertheless, as it was that or death outside, and the yard was now becoming thick with smoke, Gregory determined to
* Note: At the end of 1944 Hungary, all too belatedly, repudiated her alliance with Germany and offered to surrender to the Soviet Union. In revenge Hitler ordered the destruction of the capital and, before the Russians arrived, the Germans shelled and bombed into ruins a great part of the beautiful palaces on Buda hill. But many thousands of Hungarians saved their lives by sheltering from the bombardment in the caves referred to here.
try it. The air was clearest near the gate; so most of the servants were now in a huddle by it, under the archway through which the smoke bombs were coming. Mario was among them. Gregory ran over to him and gasped:
'A pair of goggles! Have you a pair of goggles? I am going into the palace again.'
Mario nodded, and they ran together to the garage. At the back of it there was a motorcycle that belonged to him. Snatching a pair of goggles from its handlebars he thrust them at Gregory and panted:
'One moment, I have others. If I can help I will come with you.' Turning to a box of spares he unearthed two older pairs, the elastics of which were stretched, but not too badly for them to be useable.
As they emerged from the garage, Pipi came running towards them. For the first time that night he was laughing. In his round blackened face his teeth flashed like those of a negro. Behind him, by the wrist, he was dragging an old woman. For a moment he was seized with a coughing fit, then he spluttered out:
'I asked the other servants. This is old Ciska, our laundry woman. She knows where it is.'
'Thank God!' exclaimed Gregory. 'Quick! Give her one of ' those pairs of goggles, Mario.'
As she took them, Pipi snatched the other pair and said, 'She speaks only Hungarian; I will go with you to interpret.'
Mario shrugged. 'As you will. You know the cellars better than I do.'
Gregory turned to him. 'You can help in another way. God alone knows what it will be like in the caves. Anyway, we'll need torches, candles, matches. Please collect everything of that kind you can while we are gone.'
'We'll need a crowbar, too,' Pipi added. 'Not having been used for so long, it's certain the trap will be hard to get up.' As he spoke he ran into the machine shop and came out carrying a medium sized jemmy.
Sabine was standing with Magda in an angle of the yard. Hurrying over to her, Gregory told her what he hoped to do, then rejoined the others. Parts of the yard were now two or three inches deep in water from the hose. In it they re-dampened the scarves and tied them afresh over their mouths and nostrils.
With Pipi leading and old Ciska following beside Gregory, they went through a passage at the back of the garage into the main block of the house. The smoke was dense, but troubled them much less now that they wore goggles. Pipi fumbled his way along a corridor and found the stairs to the basement. Down in it there was much less smoke, but enough to justify Gregory's fear that without a mask anyone would be driven from it within a quarter of an hour.
Pipi was snapping the lights on as he advanced and old Ciska kept mumbling to him in Hungarian. They walked in Indian file along several low stone flagged passages, then came into a broader space along one side of which were trestles supporting a row of casks. There they halted, and after a moment Pipi turned to Gregory.
'She said it was in the beer cellar and this is the beer cellar. But now she says that, although it's nearly thirty" years since she's been in this part of the basement, she's sure that the beer cellar she remembers was not like this.'
'Probably she has confused it in her mind with a cellar that holds wine casks,' Gregory suggested. 'Is there one that does?'
'Yes, Herr Commandant.'
'Then let's take her to it.'
For a moment Pipi was silent, then he burst out, 'St Stephen's curse upon it! We cannot. The wine cellars are locked, and I keep the keys in my room upon the second floor. This scarf is not enough protection to go upstairs. I'd be suffocated before I could get back with them.'
'Perhaps we can break down the door. Anyway, let's go and see.'
With a despondent shake of the head Pipi turned about, and led them down a corridor at right angles to the one by which they had come to another open space. Giving a helpless shrug, he pointed to an ancient nail studded door set in a low archway.
Gregory gave vent to a peculiarly blasphemous Italian oath that he used only in times of exceptional stress. The jemmy that Pepi was holding might have been a matchstick for all the good it would have been against such a door. Nothing short of dynamite would have burst its lock or forced it off its hinges.
The wave of evil fury that had rocked his mind was past in a moment. Swiftly he began to assess the chances of his being able to get Pipi's keys himself. It meant going up three flights of stairs back stairs that were unknown to him finding a room somewhere at the opposite end of the house to the one he had occupied a room that he had never entered then in pitch darkness locating solely from its description the right drawer in a bureau or writing table, and finally getting safely back to the cellar again.
'No,' he decided. Pipi was no coward and if, knowing the house from cellar to attic, would not take such a gamble, it would be sheer lunacy for him to attempt it. The sulphur laden air would overcome him and he would be choking his life out before he could even find Pipi's room.
Yet, if they failed to locate the trap door, it could be only a matter of an hour or so and he would be choking his life out in his own blood outside in the street. Either way was going to be extremely painful, and he had an idea that asphyxiation would prove the more so; but it had the advantage that at least he would make sure of not falling alive into Grauber's hands. And, after all, there was always the chance that by some miracle he might succeed in getting the keys.
Old Ciska had been peering uncertainly round her through the bluish haze. Now she muttered something to Pipi. Turning to Gregory he exclaimed excitedly, 'She says this is it! That in the old days the beer cellar used to be here!'
The old crone was nodding her head up and down and pointing with a skinny finger to a wide embrasure about fifteen feet away between two great squat pillars that supported a vaulted arch. 'She says that's where the scantling used to run,' Pipi interpreted, 'and that the trapdoor is in the corner by the left-hand pillar.'
Gregory was already staring in that direction; but instead of joy his face held a worried frown. In more recent years the embrasure had been used as a bin for empty bottles. Hundreds of them w
ere stacked in it, six or eight deep and five feet high. To shift enough of them to get at the floor under any part of the stack was going to be a formidable task. In consternation he said, 'Ask her if she's certain absolutely certain.'
Pipi put the question and, with a muffled cackle of laughter from behind her scarf, Ciska began to babble cheerfully. 'She should know, even after all these years. Bela the pantry man had brought her there when she was a girl, given her too much beer and tossed her petticoats over her head. Afterwards they came there often. Once they had nearly been caught by the cellar master. It was then Bela had shown her the trapdoor. He had pulled it up and made her hide crouching on the steps underneath it until the old boy had gone. Soon after that Bela had been taken for the war, and there had been a child. The old Baroness had been very angry and sent her to live in the country. But there had been plenty of fine fellows there. None of them were such lusty chaps as Bela, though…'
Cutting her short, Pipi told Gregory that he felt sure the old woman knew what she was talking about.
'Come on then!' Gregory flung himself at the left-hand end of the great stack of bottles and began to throw them into the farthest corner. It was gruelling work and terribly exasperating; for no sooner had a space a foot or so deep been cleared at the side of the pillar than more bottles from the centre of the stack rolled down into it. Soon the pile of bottles and broken glass in the corner threatened to block the passage, so they had to start another pile against the cellar door. Smoke was still seeping down from above through all sorts of unsuspected crannies and the atmosphere was stifling.
Five, ten, fifteen minutes had slipped by since they had left' the courtyard. They were still only halfway down the stack, and fresh avalanches set them back every few moments. Gregory began to despair of reaching the floor before they were exhausted. Old Ciska laboured manfully, but Pipi suddenly left them, so Gregory feared he had been forced to throw his hand in. But Pipi returned carrying a bundle of new laths that had been cut for him to bin away the year's making of Baratsch, and with these they succeeded in shoring up the bulk of the remaining bottles in the stack.
After that the work went easier, although Gregory was worried now that soon the courtyard would be getting so thick with smoke that Sabine would either faint from suffocation, or find herself compelled to break out with her servants into the street.
Sweating, half blinded, and with throats like limekilns, they kept at it until the last dozen bottles in the corner where they were delving had been thrown aside. Gregory gave a grunt of relief and joy. They had uncovered a square stone slab with an iron ring in it.
Seizing the ring, he pulled with all his 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 Ciska 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 between 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 into 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 most hold many perils. If the Goddess of Fortune should turn her back, they might die there in the darkness under Buda hill.
In The Caves
Chapter 18
The steps were only about eighteen inches wide, but they 1 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 hundreds, 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 comers 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 ex
amined 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-quarter 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 agonizing 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 borne 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.
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