IN the centre of the kingdom there was a large thick wood. In it every kind of tree with perennial foliage grew luxuriantly. They did not turn yellow in the fall, nor had they need in the spring to clothe themselves again in tender green. The sun did not enter to warm the grass; the foliage was too thick. And divers brooks wandered about in the wood. No wild beasts infested it. Simple paths, traced by the feet of those that came there, and almost always running along the banks of the brooks, following their course, led to an open space that was in the middle of the wood.
Nobody could recall that it had ever rained in that open space; and a very old and rooted tradition held that really it never did rain in that clearing in the wood. Even on stormy days, which were very few, it seemed as if there must be a hole in the clouds, made to prevent that mysterious open space from being wet by the waters of heaven. And in that open space was the cavern.
The cavern consisted of an opening in the rock, a mouth of stone, within which a little pathway ran down, very steep, but easy to follow. The pathway ran into the cave, until at about two hundred steps' distance, it turned abruptly behind a projecting boulder and was lost to sight.
Nobody knew, nobody could know, what there was in the depths of the cavern behind the boulder. None of those that had passed that point had ever returned, or had ever given any sort of sign by which their fate might be guessed. Children had entered there, youths, and full-grown men—women, old men—sane people and mad, unhappy and gay; and not one had given the least hint of what was within there. Once they had rounded the turn, nothing further was known of them: neither the sound of a fall, nor a scream, nor a groan, nor even a sigh. They were swallowed in complete and utter silence.
