"Few people have," Polgara replied, "though the sound lingers in some of these galleries for days."
"What were they singing?"
"A hymn to UL. It's repeated every hour, and the echoes keep it alive. These caves have been singing that same hymn for five thousand years now."
There were other sounds as well, the scrape of metal against metal, snatches of conversation in the guttural language of the Ulgos, and an endless chipping sound, coming, it seemed, from a dozen places.
"There must be a lot of them down there," Barak observed, peering over the edge.
"Not necessarily," Belgarath told him. "Sound lingers in these caves, and the echoes keep coming back over and over again."
"Where does the light come from?" Durnik asked, looking puzzled. "I don't see any torches."
"The Ulgos grind two different kinds of rock to powder," Belgarath replied. "When you mix them, they give off a glow."
"It's pretty dim light," Durnik observed, looking down toward the floor of the cavern.
"Ulgos don't need all that much light."
It took them almost half an hour to reach the cavern floor. The walls around the bottom were pierced at regular intervals with the openings of corridors and galleries radiating out into the solid rock of the mountain. As they passed, Garion glanced down one of the galleries. It was very long and dimly lighted with openings along its walls and a few Ulgos moving from place to place far down toward the other end.
In the center of the cavern lay a large, silent lake, and they skirted the edge of it as Belgarath moved confidently, seeming to know precisely where he was going. Somewhere from far out on the dim lake, Garion heard a faint splash, a fish perhaps or the sound of a dislodged pebble from far above falling into the water. The echo of the singing they had heard when they entered the cavern still lingered, curiously loud in some places and very faint in others.
Two Ulgos waited for them near the entrance to one of the galleries. They bowed and spoke briefly to Belgarath. Like the men who had met them in the portal chamber, both were short and heavy-shouldered. Their hair was very pale and their eyes large and almost black.
"We'll leave the horses here," Belgarath said. "We have to go down some stairs. These men will care for them."
The colt, still trembling, had to be told several times to stay with his mother, but he finally seemed to understand. Then Garion hurried to catch up to the others, who had already entered the mouth of one of the galleries.
There were doors in the walls of the gallery they followed, doors opening into small cubicles, some of them obviously workshops of one kind or another and others just as obviously arranged for domestic use. The Ulgos inside the cubicles continued at their tasks, paying no attention to the party passing in the gallery. Some of the pale-haired people were working with metal, some with stone, a few with wood or cloth. An Ulgo woman was nursing a small baby.
Behind them in the cavern they had first entered, the sound of the chanting began again. They passed a cubicle where seven Ulgos, seated in a circle, were reciting something in unison.
"They spend a great deal of time in religious observances," Belgarath remarked as they passed the cubicle. "Religion's the central fact of Ulgo life."
"Sounds dull," Barak grunted.
At the end of the gallery a flight of steep, worn stairs descended sharply, and they went down, their hands on the wall to steady themselves.
"It would be easy to get turned around down here," Silk observed. "I've lost track of which direction we're going."
"Down," Hettar told him.
"Thanks," Silk replied dryly.
At the bottom of the stairs they entered another cavern, once again high up in the wall, but this time the cavern was spanned by a slender bridge, arching across to the other side. "We cross that," Belgarath told them and led them out onto the bridge that arched through the half light to the other side.
Garion glanced down once and saw a myriad of gleaming openings dotting the cavern walls far below. The openings did not appear to have any systematic arrangement, but rather seemed scattered randomly. "There must be a lot of people living here," he said to his grandfather.
The old man nodded. "It's the home cave of one of the major Ulgo tribes," he replied.
The first disharmonic phrases of the ancient hymn to UL drifted up to them as they neared the other end of the bridge. "I wish they'd find another tune," Barak muttered sourly. "That one's starting to get on my nerves."
"I'll mention that to the first Ulgo I meet," Silk told him lightly. "I'm sure they'll be only too glad to change songs for you."
"Very funny," Barak said.
"It probably hasn't occurred to them that their song isn't universally admired."
"Do you mind?" Barak asked acidly.
"They've only been singing it for five thousand years now."
"That'll do, Silk," Aunt Pol told the little man.
"Anything you say, great lady," Silk answered mockingly.
They entered another gallery on the far side of the cavern and followed it until it branched. Belgarath firmly led them to the left.
"Are you sure?" Silk asked. "I could be wrong, but it seems like we're going in a circle."
"We are."
"I don't suppose you'd care to explain that."
"There's a cavern we wanted to avoid, so we had to go around it."
"Why did we have to avoid it?"
"It's unstable. The slightest sound there might bring the roof down."
"Oh."
"That's one of the dangers down here."
"You don't really need to go into detail, old friend," Silk said, looking nervously at the roof above. The little man seemed to be talking more than usual, and Garion's own sense of oppression at the thought of all the rock surrounding him gave him a quick insight into Silk's mind. The sense of being closed in was unbearable to some men, and Silk, it appeared, was one of them. Garion glanced up also, and seemed to feel the weight of the mountain above pressing down firmly on him. Silk, he decided, might not be the only one disturbed by the thought of all that dreadful mass above them.
The gallery they followed opened out into a small cavern with a glassclear lake in its center. The lake was very shallow and it had a white gravel bottom. An island rose from the center of the lake, and on the island stood a building constructed in the same curiously pyramidal shape as the buildings in the ruined city of Prolgu far above. The building was surrounded by a ring of columns, and here and there benches were carved from white stone. Glowing crystal globes were suspended on long chains from the ceiling of the cavern about thirty feet overhead, and their light, while still faint, was noticeably brighter than that in the galleries through which they had passed. A white marble causeway crossed to the island, and a very old man stood at its end, peering across the still water toward them as they entered the cavern.