An iron railing along the stairs gives you the confidence to attempt the ascent into darkness.

As you approach the stairway, you see that there is a very squat candle on every other step. Hard to knock over, and even if you did accidentally kick a candle off the stairs, it would merely fall to the stone floor below, where there is nothing to burn. Seems safe enough.

And --- aha! --- this means that you do not have to leave this room unattended with all those candles behind you lit! You light the first five candles on the stairs, then make a circuit of the room, blowing out the candle flames you brought forth earlier.

You return to the beckoning rise. Gripping the cold railing in one hand, and the candle you carried into this room with you in the other, you climb the first dozen steps. You light two candles near the step you stand on, then go down and blow out the first five.

Approaching the top again, you see that the stairs go through a hole in the stonework of the ceiling and continue several more steps upward into a wider space. No sound or light reaches you from above. You decide to climb farther.

From the hole in the ceiling, smooth wooden walls rise up on either side of the stairs, creating the feeling of being in something more like an ordinary house. After a meter or two, you see something that looks absolutely incongruous after the rooms you have just been examining: something on the left-hand wall that appears to be a light switch!

After a moment's hesitation, you switch the candleholder to a finger on your other hand, turn around, and descend far enough to extinguish the lonely candle flames at the twelfth and fourteenth steps. Now in the dim dim light of your shrinking candle, you carefully climb back up to the switch, all your senses alert for the slightest sound . . .

. . . the smallest misstep.

Nothing. You find the switch again, and now you notice that where the left-hand wall continues on, the right-hand wall has folded away to become floor. In fact, wooden floor with rugs.