Once they were in the pipe, they just kept climbing.
The inside of the pipe was smooth and it was wet. Every now and then, they slipped. But their sharp little feet found places to grip on to and always they kept struggling upward.
Neither of them looked back. They just kept going.
Luckily the pipe was not very long. Quite soon they were at the top. They came up through a little hole. It was a drainage hole for a shower, but they didn’t know that. The shower was in a shower-room, and the shower-room was in the home of a Hoo-Min. But they didn’t know that, either.
The two centis scrambled out. They were not standing on earth. They were standing on something smooth and hard. They listened. Nothing! They crept further from the hole and began to explore.
They ran around two sides of the small room (not that they knew about rooms). Then they found a long opening – a crack – that they could run through. They were so muddled up and frightened and tired that it was only when they were about to run through this crack that Harry thought to look around for Belinda.
She wasn’t there.
He rushed back to the hole and looked down. It was dark down there. A trickle of white-choke came up. He couldn’t see anything.
“Mama!” he crackled.
From the door-crack George signalled, “Come on!”
“I can’t! I can’t leave her!”
“If she wanted to come up, she could, easily.”
“But why would she stay down there? – MAMA!”
“She told us to keep going, that she’d be all right! She knows all the tunnels. She’s probably found another tunnel to go home by!”
“She wouldn’t leave us. I’m going back down!” said Harry.
George dashed back to the drainage hole and grabbed Harry by a back leg.
“You are not going back down there!” he said. “She helped us get up here, that’s what she wanted! She wants you to obey her. Do what you’re told for once! Come on, we must find another way to get out before a Hoo-Min comes!”
Very unwillingly, Harry took his head out of the hole and let George pull him to the door. They didn’t know it was a door, of course. They went under the bottom of it and found themselves in an enormous black-dark place. It wasn’t no-top, but the top was so far away that at first they thought they must be outside. But there was no earth under their feet and it all smelt strange and horrible.
It smelt of Hoo-Min, and Hoo-Min food, and shut-in-ness, and it scared them silly. It also mixed them up.
They ran for a long time, alongside a straight-up-hard-thing. They were trying to find a hole or any way out, but they couldn’t find one.
They were getting very, very tired.
The hard cold stuff began to hurt their feet. But that wasn’t the worst.
It was warm in that place. And dry. And into the hearts of the two centis came a great fear. Not just that they would never escape. But that they would Dry Out.
“I think – I think we should go back down the Up-Pipe,” said Harry.
“If we can find it,” said George.
Harry stopped running.
“It’s over that way,” he said.
“No, it’s not. It’s over that way.”
George waved his feelers in the opposite direction.
They looked at each other.
“Hx,” said George slowly. “I think we’re lost.”