The opening led, as I thought, to remains of a broken staircase, roughly spiral, in the thickness of the great wall. Many of the steps were broken away, and I was soon in darkness. I came back, shuddering, for Jakoub’s lantern which he had left with me, and stiff and sore and frightened as I was, I clambered up and up and came at last out into the rushing, blinding storm again, on the top of the vast wall of the Temple.
It was broken into irregular masses of enormous masonry, and must originally have been some twenty feet in width. The tunnel piercing the bottom of the wall was forty feet in length, and I guessed I must be about sixty feet above the ground. But the storm drove me down before I could form any estimate of its length, or discover how much of the building existed. I could see nothing through the driving sand.
I came back to my chamber, which had already begun to seem homelike to me, and Jakoub was there waiting for me.
I was glad to see him. I think I would have been glad of the company of an orang-utan, if adequately chained, for I was finding out what a horrible thing solitude can be although it was not twenty-four hours since I had parted with Edmund and Welfare.
Jakoub greeted me with his invariable “all raight?” and I grunted at him for reply. I felt I had a reputation as an English gentleman to maintain.
“We cannot start the camels to-day, effendi,” he went on, “the sand is still very bad.”
“We didn’t reckon to travel to-day,” I reminded him. “What about to-night?”
He shrugged his shoulders in his disgustingly expressive way.
“No good, effendi. The camels would not put their heads—I mean what you call—face it. It may blow all to-morrow again, or it might stop to-night.”
“Well, we’ve got to wait for it then, and not worry,” I answered irritably. “How are you and the other fellows off for food?”