When breakfast was finished, Marco asked Burton to accompany him to the chamber below.
"Twenty years ago," he said, "when I was here, we kept a few prisoners in a cellar below the floor. Shall we not place our prisoners there now, for safety's sake?"
"Let us have a look at it," Burton returned.
Scraping away the litter of hay, earth, and fragments of wood from a corner of the floor, Marco disclosed a trap-door. They lifted this, and Burton descended a short ladder, Marco following him with an improvised torch. They found themselves in a shallow cellar, stuffy but dry.
"What is this?" exclaimed Marco, pointing to a number of small wooden boxes ranged along one wall. "They were not here in my time."
The boxes were thickly covered with dust, and had evidently been long undisturbed. Burton carefully prised up the lid of one of them.
"It is full of sticks of dynamite!" he said, astonished. "A strange find, upon my word!"
"'A STRANGE FIND, UPON MY WORD!'"
"And look!" added Marco. "There is a tunnel--that was not here either."