All at once he remembered the seat made use of by the sergeant, and after a little search he found it, and sat down in the lap of the stone figure.
It was cool and restful there, and he sat listening for the sergeant’s step; but it did not come, and as he rested there, musing over what he had seen during his last visit, he asked himself why he should wait—why, as he was there, he should not go down by himself—for he felt sure that he could find his way in and out to where the lamp stood upon the stone ledge.
When he had reached as far as this his brain became more active, and in imagination he ran on down the steps, and on amongst the great dwarf pillars by the cell-like places, with their sliding doors of stone slabs; and then, after pausing for a time, shuddering at the horrors of a man being shut up in such a tomb-like place, possibly to be left to starve and die, he diverted his line of thought, and crossed to the great square doorway where the six-armed idol sat on guard over what must be the Rajah’s treasure.
“I should like to see what he has there,” thought Dick, “but it would be horribly mean to try and get in. I don’t mind finding out where the treasure is kept, for there is common-sense in what Stubbs says about our knowing where the things are that we have to guard. Precious stones of all kinds, I’ll be bound,” he said to himself: “and I know what I’ll do—I’ll ask him to show me. He’ll do anything I want. No, I’m not going to peep about like that, and I shouldn’t care to be hanging about the great doorway—it would look so spy-like—but I must find out the meaning of that passage, and I feel sure it is as I suspect. Hang that sergeant! Why can’t he be here when he’s wanted?”
He sat for quite another half-hour waiting and thinking, and then his mind was made up.
The long, strange labyrinth below was black as pitch, and weird, strange, and echoing; but he was not going to be afraid of the dark, however weird and strange it was. Pooh! a soldier, and shrink from going down alone into a place like that! It was absurd, and the thought put him on his mettle. He would go, and surprise Stubbs afterwards. The sergeant ought to have been there, and, as he was not. Dick determined to go by himself, and rose at once to combat a slight sensation of nervousness that began to attack him.
“It will be easy enough,” he said. “I have a right to be here; the Rajah considers the place as much in my charge as Wyatt’s, and I will go now.”
Crossing the intervening space at once, he paused for a moment or two to look back and listen, but nothing was visible from there but a faint dawn of light, and there was not a sound to be heard.
Then slipping in behind the square pillar, he made his way along the narrow passage in the darkness, feeling the side and guessing the distance, growing more and more cautious as he proceeded, lest he should step too far and go headlong down the stairs.
Ah, there was the lamp in its place; but suppose it had not been trimmed since!