"I led the way; our Tibetan came next; Redfern brought up the rear. We kept a good look-out, of course; but had no suspicion of danger until I heard the clang of the shutter behind me. They had dropped it a minute too soon. The Tibetan and I were shut in; Redfern was shut out; they hadn't seen him, fifty yards or so behind, round the bend. What followed was pretty much as you described your own experiences. I had just time to fire off my revolver in a way that Redfern would understand as a warning, before the gas overcame me. My Tibetan was already unconscious: I never saw him again.
"Next day they took me into the Temple, and I had a very interesting interview with the August and Venerable. As I told you, he did not turn on the Eye for my benefit; indeed, he was very courteous and suave, and I didn't pay much attention to his exposition of the Law of the Eye. It was only when I had committed the unpardonable offence of knocking down one of his priests, and he sent me down here, that I thought him anything but a plausible old humbug with ogreish tendencies.
"Prepared as I was, his little hypnotic tricks with the green eye had made no impression on me. The general atmosphere of mystery, and what I learned from the people on the plateau, convinced me that he was hiding some precious secret below stairs, and the sight of his golden throne made me suspect its nature. Never in my life was I better pleased than when they brought me down their subterranean stairs to learn wisdom! And I hadn't been here an hour before my suspicions became certainty. That Chinaman yonder will be engaged all day in letting lead plates down into the pit, and drawing them up pure gold. The plates are brought down from above: they explain the knocking you heard from the building near the old iniquity's pagoda. There is not a tool of any kind here: nothing but chopsticks, even, for eating our food; the lead is cut and hammered into plates above. The first day I was on the plateau I saw some of the prisoners staggering to that building under heavy loads. I conjecture that the Old Man has confederates somewhere outside, in China probably, who supply him at intervals with the lead, and receive the gold in return."
"It sounds incredible," exclaimed Forrester, interrupting his companion for the first time.
"The word 'incredible' ought to be banished from our vocabulary," Beresford rejoined emphatically. "Nothing is incredible. They'd have said the same thing only thirty years ago about petrol engines, wireless telegraphy, and aeroplanes. I am convinced that the search for the Philosopher's Stone, which baffled the alchemists for hundreds of years, was not the absurdity we have been taught to regard it. In some far distant age, someone discovered that Nature herself turned the base into the precious metal; the fact was rumoured abroad, though the scene of the transmutation was never allowed to become known; and the alchemists wasted their lives in trying to do artificially what had already been done by natural process. Why, aren't our chemists at the present day groping in the same direction? Don't they tell us that all terrestrial things are merely forms of the same ultimate element, or manifestations of the same ultimate force? Doesn't every fresh discovery point that way?"
"But how is it done?"
"I don't know; the Old Man doesn't know; nobody knows. In that pit yonder, a hundred and fifty feet deep, as I calculate, there is a bed of some substance that possesses this marvellous property--call it radio-active if you like. It can't be radium, for the emanations of radium produce sores on the body, as you know, and these wretched Chinamen have no sores. Its effect, from what you tell me--and I confess your news astonished and appalled me--is far more terrible. Evidently exposure to its direct ray causes instant demolition--annihilation is not the word; dust remains. Proximity to it brings about a sapping of the will; you yourself felt that in your cell; I feel it too. In the cavern yonder the effect is intensified. This mysterious power causes the mind to decay and the body to wither. How old do you suppose that Chinaman is?"
"He looks about seventy."
"He is twenty-eight! I don't know it from himself; he has no memory, cannot even tell you his name. But one of the others is his cousin--looks forty and is actually twenty-two. He has been here a year, taking his turn with the rest at the work; they have a day each. And there's a mystery about the whole organisation which at present I can't fathom. All the prisoners here engaged in the horrible work are young Chinamen of good family. I was told that on the plateau. Why does the old villain employ none but his own countrymen? I shall find out by and by; I haven't been here long enough to learn much; the poor wretches are so mentally abject that I have to go slowly with them. I do know this: that they are all brought in by priests of the second order. When one dies--their bodies are cast into the pit--he is immediately replaced by another. It seems that some of these priests are constantly prowling about the country, snatching up likely subjects here and there, some to recruit the labourers on the plateau, others for this diabolical work below. Your old Indian told me that every now and then a priest of the second order shaves his moustache and head, and enters the ranks of the first, after which he never goes into the world outside. It suggests that they are promoted after they have bagged a certain number of prisoners. How the priests are themselves recruited I don't know. They are all celibates; I suppose the Old Man has emissaries out proselytising. But these are all conjectures: I hope to find out a good deal more for certain before we get away."
"You know how to get away, then?" Forrester asked eagerly.