“Well, judging by the sound, it takes a stone a good while to get to the bottom. I should have been there myself long before this but for Bhallu Khan here. In fact, I was placidly walking into it when he laid violent hands on me.”
“Really? How horrible! Let’s leave it now, and go outside. The idea of such a thing oppresses one in here.”
She turned away. Her voice was unshaken. Beyond just a faint quickening in her tone, she might have been listening to some mere abstract risk run by somebody she had never seen or heard of before, and Campian could not see her face.
“Just take one more look around before you go outside,” he said. “The idea of those hidden valuables being here won’t wash. Both floor and walls are of solid rock. There is no possibility of burying anything.”
“Hardly, I should think,” she answered, after a few moments’ critical survey of the interior. “But, this is not an artificial cavern, surely?”
“No. I have seen others rather like it, though none quite of its size. But if you follow out the formation of the place, it is all on the same slant. The crevasse, to be sure, is at something of a different angle, but that is nothing to go by here, where the whole side of a mountain is seamed and criss-crossed with the most irregular network of fissures.”
“What if the things are at the bottom of that cleft?” said Vivien.
At the bottom of it! This was a new idea. Was it a new light? But he replied:
“Then they will remain there till the crack of doom. The hole is of immense depth—Bhallu Khan and I sounded it from every point—and is sure to contain noxious gas at a certain distance below the surface. Do you mind if I ask you a favour?—oh nothing very great!” seeing her start. “It is not to talk about this, or speculate before others as to the possibility of such a thing existing.”
“Why, of course, if you wish it! But—do you believe in it, then?”