Volume Two—Chapter Fifteen.
Chumbley’s Coolness.
“I say, this is a rum set-out, Bertie,” drawled Chumbley. “I suppose you are there?”
“Yes, I am here, or there, as you choose to call it,” replied Hilton, rather bitterly, for his bonds gave him no little pain.
“I will loosen the rajahs now,” said the voice that Chumbley had heard all through his unpleasant adventure.
Busy hands were now about them, and a knife was used to cut them free; but their limbs were so cramped by the long confinement, and so tightly bound, that they could hardly move.
Then the handkerchiefs were removed from their eyes, and they lay back on the soft matting gazing about them, the subdued light of the large room in which they found themselves being very grateful to their dazzled eyes.
The man who had set them free from the cords was a stern-looking, muscular Malay in plain cotton jacket and sarong, in whose folds were stuck a couple of formidable-looking krisses; and the place in which the prisoners’ eyes struggled with the light was a tolerably large room floored with split bamboo, the walls being for the most part a kind of basket-work of cane, partially covered with native woven hangings, while the floor was pretty well hidden by Persian and Turkish rugs.
Everything looked cool and comfortable; and, in spite of the absence of tables and chairs, there was a good deal of elegance in the way in which various ornaments of bronze and china were arranged about the apartment. Here and there, too, were objects of European manufacture, principally in glass, Italian imitations of old Venice being principally chosen.
Naturally enough the first glances of the prisoners were aimed at the windows, of which there were two, and at the door; but they were evidently strongly made, and though the bars of the windows were but wood, they were stout bamboos externally almost as hard to cut as flint.