He was seized by a feeling of despair—a mad longing to spring up and rush away somewhere, anywhere.
Staggeringly, feebly he got upon his feet, but then he was seized by another fear, and he stood still.
Dense and fearful darkness lay all around him, and he could not see what pitfalls might be on every hand.
The situation was one to chill the strongest heart, to turn the blood of the bravest man to water.
“This is some secret dungeon beneath the city, and I shall never escape from it of my own efforts,” thought the boy. “Who is there to save me? The professor does not know I left the hotel. I could not tell him, for he would have forbidden it. I was forced to leave Ephraim behind to take up the attention of the professor while I got out. Ephraim knows I was going somewhere to meet this mysterious Igela, as I supposed, but he does not know where I was going. How will they trace me?”
That was a question to which he could not find a ready answer.
“Even if Ephraim and the professor were to confront Ali Mustaf and Ben Ahmet and accuse them, the two rascally old wretches would plead utter ignorance, and there is little chance for a Christian to obtain his rights in this country. The professor might get the United States Consul to do something, but I have my doubts.”
Frank fully understood how desperate and almost hopeless his situation must be. At first he wondered that he had not been killed outright, and then he came to believe that Ali Mustaf and Ben Ahmet had hated him so that they had thrown him into the dark underground place to perish by inches in order that he might suffer wretchedly. And then it was possible that they had believed him dead when they cast him in there.
For all of the boy’s gloomy thoughts, he found his strength returning, and strength brought hope. He would not give up as long as life and energy were left in his body.
But what could he do?