Read Online The Black Stallion and the Lost City by Steve Farley - Free Book Online Page A

the current. Alec splashed closer, coming almost near enough to touch the stallion. All at once, the Black slipped again and rolled into the water. Alec leaped through the air to make one last desperate attempt to reach his horse. His body flattened and was swept up in the turbulence, his hands stretched out.
    The fingers of his right hand felt something and closed around the lead shank that trailed in the water at the stallion’s side. With the touch of the rope came a feeling of intense relief. Whatever happened to them now, Alec thought, he wasn’t letting go. Whatever happened now would happen to them together.
    Alec clenched his fist around the shank as the current dragged them deeper into the tunnel. All around him was cold, wet darkness and black water. He saw nothing and heard only the slap of water on the walls of the cave. Alec quickly realized that fighting the rip current was harder now than before. Tied together with the Black, their speed was only increasing, their combined weight making it all the more impossible to battle the current. To make matters even worse, the water was deeper here, and when Alec tried to find the bottom, it was no longer there.
    The rushing stream overwhelmed them, running ever faster as it hurried them through the lightless void. Alec fought to keep his head out of the water. All his channels of sense and reason seemed blocked, his brain racked by an overpowering fear. He felt more than heard a roar in the blackness ahead and around him, like the sound of an oncoming train inside a tunnel. The Black’s lead shank suddenly jerked wildly and was torn from his hand. Alec grabbed desperately after it but felt nothing but empty space. The water beneath him fell away, and he was in a free fall, tumbling through a hole in the darkest night imaginable.
    Alec had taken plenty of spills in his life, but never anything like this. “I am alive,” he told himself, thinking of nothing else but those three words and repeating them over and over in his mind as he fell throughthe air. To black out now would mean to die. His only chance of survival was to stay awake and hope for a soft landing.
    After a long drop, he hit the water again, water that felt like concrete as he slammed into it. Dark, cold wetness swallowed him as he was driven deep under the surface. Alec held his breath, hanging on to the three-word chant in his mind telling him he was alive, awake and conscious. He tried to roll himself into a ball and felt his body tossing head over heels until one leg struck bottom. It was a hard hit but not as hard as it might have been in shallower water. Pushing off the bottom, Alec swam for the surface, gasping for air as he finally reached it. Opening his eyes, he saw nothing. Everything around him remained pitch-black.
    “Black,” Alec screamed as he beat his arms against the current, groping the darkness, listening for any sign of his horse. He knew that if he had survived the fall, chances were the Black had too. And though he could see nothing in the darkness, he knew his horse must be close. He called again but still no answer came.
    Alec realized he was now caught in still another underground river running somewhere deep inside the mountain. The current spun him around and dragged him along as he struggled to catch his breath. He commanded his mind to stay conscious. It was his choice to live or die, and he knew he must live.
    For many moments, time seemed to stand still. At last he could see the tunnel ahead was no longer quite so dark. He began to make out the contours of the cave walls, twenty feet on either side of him, and the ceiling hanging less than six feet above.
    The dark waters of the river funneled around a curve. Alec’s legs bumped into rocks. His feet touched bottom, but he couldn’t have stopped if he had wanted to. The current quickened as it approached a vertical slit in the dark rock wall.
    The opening was a six-foot-wide gash in the rock and through it beamed