Finally the Queen sat down on the bottom of the
pit and leaned her back against the wall. By good
luck her sharp elbow touched a secret spring in
the wall and a big flat rock swung inward. Ann
fell over backward, but the next instant she
jumped up and cried to the others:
"A passage! A passage! Follow me, my brave men,
and we may yet escape."
Then she began to crawl through the passage,
which was as dark and dank as the pit, and the
officers followed her in single file. They
crawled, and they crawled, and they kept on
crawling, for the passage was not big enough to
allow them to stand upright. It turned this way
and twisted that, sometimes like a corkscrew and
sometimes zigzag, but seldom ran for long in a
straight line.
"It will never end--never!" moaned the officers,
who were rubbing all the skin off their knees on
the rough rocks.
"It must end," retorted Ann courageously, "or
it never would have been made. We don't know
where it will lead us to, but any place is better
than that loathsome pit."
So she crawled on, and the officers crawled on,
and while they were crawling through this awful
underground passage Polychrome and Shaggy and
Files and the Rose Princess, who were standing
outside the entrance to Ruggedo's domains, were
wondering what had become of them.
Chapter Seventeen
A Tragic Transformation
"Don't let us worry," said Shaggy to his
companions, "for it may take the Queen some time
to conquer the Metal Monarch, as Tik-Tok has to do
everything in his slow, mechanical way.
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