“Oh my dear Alan, I am afraid I have forgotten it long ago.”
“Never mind,” went on Alan excitedly. “It’s the sixteenth chapter, if I remember rightly. I’ll remind you of it—Don’t you remember the Chosen People rose up against Moses—”
“Well?”
“I can’t remember the exact verses but somewhere in the chapter it tells you that the ‘earth was torn asunder, and swallowed up the three men with their houses and everything that appertained unto them, and they went down alive into the pit, and the earth closed over them.’”
Desmond looked bewildered and remained silent.
“Don’t you see the connection, Dez?”
“No! I do not.”
“Well, here are people living in the bowels of the earth, and in their temple they have inscribed in bad Hebrew, if I may so put it, the names of Abiram and Dathan. What more likely than that these people are the descendants of those poor unfortunates of the Old Testament who perished some fourteen hundred and ninety years before Christ?”
“Is it possible?” asked Desmond breathlessly.
“Why not?” answered his cousin. “The Bible story ends there. We’re simply told that they went into the pit alive—we are never told that they died! Now we are convinced that they speak a corrupt Hebrew, we ought to find it very easy to learn to speak to them, and then we will bid for freedom.”