A WAY OUT?
The woman stood pointing into a black recess at the far end of the crypt. All that the Master could discern there, at first, was a darkness even greater than that which shrouded the corners of the vault.
"Light, here!" he commanded. Ferrara swung a lamp, by its chain, into the recess. They saw a low, square opening in the wall of dull, gleaming metal.
"A passage, eh?" the Master ejaculated.
"Maybe a cul-de-sac," she answered. "But—there's no telling—it may lead somewhere."
"By Allah! Men! Here—all of you!"
The Master's voice rang imperatively. They all came trooping with naked or slippered feet that slid in the wet redness of the floor. Broken exclamations sounded.
Seizing the lamp, the Master thrust it into the opening, which measured no more than four feet high by three wide. The light smokily illuminated about three yards of this narrow passage. Then a sharp turn to the right concealed all else.
Whither this runway might lead, to what peril or what trap it might conduct them, none could tell. Very strongly it reminded the Master of the gallery in the Great Pyramid of Gizeh, which he had seen twelve years before—the gallery which in ancient days had served as a death-trap for treasure-seekers.
That gallery, he remembered, had contained a cleverly hidden stone in its floor which once on a time had precipitated pilferers down a vertical shaft more than a hundred feet, to death, in the bowels of that huge, terrifying mausoleum.
Was this passage of similar purpose and design? In all probability, yes. Oriental ways run parallel in all the lands of the East.
Nevertheless, the passage offered a means of escaping from the crypt. And there, with the dead Maghrabi mudirs, the Legionaries could not stay. In a few minutes now, at most, the men of Jannati Shahr would be upon them.
"Faith, what the devil now?" exclaimed Bohannan, now seeming quite rational, as he peered into the cramped corridor. "Where to Hell does this lead?"
"Just where you've said, to Hell, it's far more than likely," the
Master retorted. "Come, men, into it! Follow me!"
He stooped, lamp in one hand, simitar in the other, and in a most cramped posture entered the passage. After him came Leclair, the woman, Bohannan, and the others.
The air hung close and heavy. The oppression of that stooping position, the lamp-smoke, the unusual strain on the muscles, the realization of a whole world of gold above and all about them, seemed to strangle and enervate them. But steadily they kept on and on.
The turning of the passage revealed a long, descending incline, that sloped down at an angle of perhaps thirty degrees. A marked rise in temperature grew noticeable. What might that mean? None could imagine, but not one even thought of turning back.
The walls and floor in this straight, descending passage were now no longer smooth, arabesqued, polished. To the contrary, they showed a rough surface, on which the marks of the chisel could be plainly seen as it had shorn away the yielding metal in great gouges. Moreover, streaks of black granite now began to appear; and these, as the Legionaries advanced, became ever wider until at last the stone predominated.
The Master understood they were now coming to the bottom of part of the golden dyke. Undeviated by the hard rock, the tunnel continued to descend, with here and there a turn. Narrowly the Master scrutinized the floor, tapping it with the simitar as he crept onward, seeking indications of any possible trap that might hurl him into bottomless, black depths.
Quite at once, a right-angled turning opened into a small chamber not above eight feet high by fifteen square. In this, silent, listening, the sweating fugitives gathered.
The temperature was here oppressive, and the lamps burned blue with some kind of gas that stifled the lungs. Gas and smoke together, made breathing hard. A dull, roaring sound had begun to make itself vaguely audible, the past few minutes; and as the Legionaries stood listening, this was now rather plain to their ears.
"This is a devil of a place for a multi-millionaire, I must say!" Bohannan exploded. Simonds laughed, with tense nerves. One or two others swore, bitterly cursing the men of El Barr.
The Master, "Captain Alden," and Leclair, however, gave no heed. Already they were peering around, at the black walls where now only an occasional thread of gold was to be seen.
Five openings led out of this singular chamber, all equally dark, narrow, formidable.
"This seems to be a regular labyrinth, my Captain," said Leclair, in
French. "Surely a trap of some kind. They are clever, these Arabs.
They let the mouse run and hope, then—voilà—he is caught!"
"It looks that way. But we're not caught yet. These infernal passageways are all alike, to me. We must choose one. Well—this is as good as any." He gestured toward an aperture at the left. "Men, follow me!"
The passage they now entered was all of rock, with no traces whatever of gold. For a few hundred feet its course was horizontal; then it plunged downward like the first.
And almost immediately the temperature began to mount, once more.
"Faith, but I think we'd better be getting back!" exclaimed the major. "I don't care much for this heat, or that roaring noise that's getting louder all the time!"
"You'll follow me, or I'll shoot you down!" the Master flung at him, crouching around. "I've had enough insubordination from you, sir! Not another word!"
The stooping little procession of trapped Legionaries once more went onward, downward. The muffled roar, ahead of them, rose in volume as they made a final turning and came into a much more spacious vault where moisture goutted from the black walls. A thin, steamy vapor was rising from the floor, warm to the bare feet.
A moment the Legionaries stood there, blinking in the vague lamplight, glad of the respite that permitted them to straighten up and ease cramped muscles.
"No way out of here!" Bohannan grumbled. "Sure, we're at the end o' nowhere. Now if we'd only taken another passage—"
Nobody paid him any heed. The major's exhibition of irrational greed had lost caste for him. Even Lebon, the orderly, curled a lip of scorn at him.
All eyes were eagerly searching for some exit from this ultimate pit. Panting, reeking with sweat, fouled with blood and dirt, the doomed men shuffled round the vault, blinking with bloodshot eyes.
No outlet was visible. The vault seemed empty. But all at once,
Bristol uttered a cry.
"Wine-sacks, by the living jingo!" he exclaimed.
"Wine-sacks—in a Moslem city?" demanded the Master. "Impossible!"
"What else are these, sir?" the Englishman asked, pointing.
The Master strode to the corner where he stood, and flared his lamp over a score of distended goat-hides.
"Well, by Allah!" he ejaculated.
"Sacrificial wine," put in Leclair, at his elbow. "See the red seals, with the imprint of the star and crescent, here and here?" He touched a seal with his finger. "Rare old wine, I'll wager!"
"Wine!" gulped the major, whose excitable nerves had been frayed to madness. "Wine, by God! Faith, but it's the royal thirst I have on me! Who's got a knife?"
The Master thrust him back with such violence that he slipped on the wet floor and nearly fell.
"You'll get no knife, sir, and you'll drink no sacrificial wine!" he cried, with more of anger in his voice than any of the Legion had yet heard. "The jewels—yes, I gave you your fool's way, on those. But no wine!
"We of the Flying Legion are going to die, sober men! There'll be no debauchery—no tradition handed down among those Moslem swine that they butchered us, drunk. If any of you men want to die right now, broach one of those wine-sacks!"
His simitar balanced itself for action. The glint in his eye, by the wavering lamp-shine, meant stern business. Not a hand was extended toward the tautly distended sacks.
Bohannan's whispered curse was lost in a startled cry from Wallace.
"Here's something!" he exclaimed. "Look at this ring, will you?"
They turned to him, away from the wine-bags. Wallace had fallen to his knees and was scraping slime from the wet floor—the slime of ages of dust mingled with viscid moisture from the steam that, thinly blurring the dark air, had condensed on the walls and run down.
Emilio thrust down the lamp he held. There on the stone floor, they saw a huge, rust-red iron ring that lay in a circular groove cut in the black granite.
This ring was engaged in a metal staple let into the stone. And now, as they looked more closely, and as some Legionaries scraped the floor with eager hands, a crack became visible in the floor of the vault.
"Look out, men!" the Master cautioned. "This may be a trap that will swing open and drop us into God knows what! Stand back, all—take your time, now! Go slow there!"
They heeded, and stood back. The Master himself, assuming all risks, got down on hands and knees and explored the crack in the floor. It was square, with a dimension of about five feet on the edge.
"It's a trap-door, all right," he announced. "And we—are going to open it!"
"One would need a rope or a long lever to do that, my Captain," put in Leclair. "It is obvious that a man, or men, standing on the trap, could not raise it. And it is too large to straddle."
The Master arose, stripped off his tunic and passed it through the ring. He twisted the tunic and gave one end to the lieutenant. Himself, he took the other.
"Get hold, everybody!" he commanded. "And be sure you're not standing on the trap!"
All laid hold on the ends of the coat. With a "One, two, three!" from the Master, the Legionaries threw all their muscle into the lift. "Now, men! Heave her once more!"
The stone gave. The Legionaries doubled their efforts, with panting breath, feet that slipped on the dank floor, grunts of labor.
"Heave her!"
Up swung the stone, aside. It slid over the wet rock. There, in its place, gaped a black hole that penetrated unknown depths.
Steam billowed up—or rather, vapor distinctly warm to the touch. And from very far below, much louder boomed the roar of rushing waters. The Legionaries knew, now, what had caused the dull, roaring sound. Unmistakably a furious cascade was boiling, swirling away, down there at undetermined distances of blackness.
The boldest men among the little group of fugitives felt the crawl and fingering of a very great dread at their hearts. Behind them lay the labyrinth, with what pitfalls none could tell and with the Jannati Shahr men perhaps already penetrating into the crypt. Around them loomed the black, wet walls of this lowest stone dungeon with but one other exit—the pit at their feet.
The Master threw himself prone on the slippery floor, took one of the lamps and lowered it, by the chain, to its capacity. Smoke and vapor arose about his head as he peered down.
"Well, what is it?" demanded Bohannan, also squinting down, as he bent over the hole. "What do you see?"
"Nothing," the Master answered. "Nothing definite."
He could, in fact, be sure of nothing. But it seemed to him that, very far below, he could make out something like a swift, liquid blackness, streaked with dim-speeding lines of white that dissolved with phantasmagoric rapidity; a racing flood that roared and set the solid rock a-quiver in its mad tumult.
"Faith, an underground river of hot water!" ejaculated the Irishman with an oath. "Some river!"
"Warm water, at any rate," the Master judged, getting up again. A strange smile was in his eyes, by the smoky lamplight. "Well, men, this is our way out. The Arabs are not going to have any slaughter of victims, here. And what is more, they'll capture no dead bodies of white men, in this trap! There'll be at least ten skulls missing from that interesting golden Pyramid of Ayeshah!"
"For God's sake!" the major stammered. "What—what are you going to—do, now? Jump down that shaft?"
"Exactly. Your perspicacity does you credit, Major."
"Sure, you'll never catch me jumping!"
"Gentlemen," the Master said, in a low, quiet voice, "I regret to state that we have one coward among us."