“That’s the place,” he said.
[CHAPTER XXVII—IN THE LION’S MOUTH]
Jack came to himself lying on a rocky couch. For a few moments his brain refused to work. He did not comprehend where he was or what had happened. He felt stiff and sore and his head ached intolerably.
Then memory came back with a rush. He recalled the darkened hut where he had drunk the supposedly innocent cola and then, but very vaguely, the sensation of being placed in a rig and experiencing a desire to call for help without being able to raise his voice.
But where was he now?
He looked about him. He lay at the bottom of a steep walled pit, apparently hewn by man or nature out of the solid rock. The walls shot up sheer and smooth to a height of at least thirty feet. The bottom of this pit was about forty or fifty feet in circumference.
Beside him was a big canteen of water and some food. He noticed something around his shoulders, something that passed under his armpits. It was a rope about forty feet long. So, then, he had been lowered into this pit by somebody. But by whom?
His mind reverted to Cummings. Jack was tolerably certain now that he had been drugged by his crafty enemy, but he could not bring himself to believe that Cummings’ mind had plotted the bold stroke by which he had been marooned in this pit. Some master wit had contrived that.
Jack’s head swam as he began to sense the full horror of his situation. He did not even know how long he had been there. He looked at his watch. The hands pointed to three o’clock. He had wound the watch in the morning, so it was clear that it was the same day as the one on which he had entered Mother Jenny’s place with Cummings.
He rose dizzily to his feet and, steadying himself with one hand against the rock walls, looked about him with greater minuteness. Far above was the blue dome of the sky and at the top of those walls lay freedom. But he might as well have been in China for all the good it did him. He was cut off from his friends as effectually as if on the other side of the globe.