This is scarce ten feet in depth, and lowering the [[225]]flickering lantern, they see a passage leading from it in the right direction.
“Now,” whispers Guy to Corker, “keep watch here. If you’re attacked make the best fight you can and warn and save me if possible. If not, remain exactly as you are.”
“You’d better let me go with you, captain!”
“No, I’ll risk my own life first. I have the drawings, I have the light, I have the keys.”
First lowering the lantern to the bottom to be sure that there is no foul air that may bring him death, Chester descends and finds a paved passageway scarce large enough for two men to pass abreast, with a vaulted arch of masonry overhead. Striding along this, though his heart beats faster, his nerves act steadily.
Within two hundred feet from the bottom of the shaft he encounters the first iron doors. These are immensely strong, and would yield to nothing save explosion. Inspecting by the lantern’s light the instructions for the use of the successive keys, though Guy has already memorized them, he oils the first key with finest olive oil and inserts it.
The locks have evidently been left in perfect order and secured against all damp and rust. The key turns readily. Then the second is tried; again the wards yield; next the third with equal success. Withdrawing this Chester discovers how beautiful is the mechanism of the Italian, for the two immense iron doors would swing on their hinges to an infant’s touch.
So far the dying Paciotto has told him the truth.
He goes on more confidently. The second pair of doors, from the surging of the waters that he hears faintly above him, he knows is under the moat itself. These yielding with equal readiness to the talisman he holds, disclose to Chester the apparatus the engineer had spoken of, and of which he holds the drawing in his hand, the one regulating the valves that will deluge him with the waters of the moat if Alva’s statue is destroyed.
Following the directions on the paper, he disconnects these, shutting off connection with the moat, and to make things doubly sure wedges these valves in their places. [[226]]