"The next sight's gruesome!" he announced, his voice booming hollow among the shadows.
The passage turned into a lofty chamber in the rock, whose walls once had all been lined with dressed stone, but some of the lining had fallen. In the shadows at one end an image of Jinendra smiled complacently, and there were some ancient brass lamps banging on chains from arches cut into the rock on every side.
"This is the grue," said Dick, holding his lantern high.
Its light fell on a circle of skeletons, all perfect, each with its head toward a brass bowl in the center.
"Ugh!" growled Tom Tripe. "Those are the ghosts that dig o' nights!
Go smell 'em, Trotters! Are they the enemy?"
The dog sniffed the bones, but slunk away again uninterested.
"Nothing doing!" laughed Dick. "You haven't laid the ghost yet, Tom!"
"Have you got your pistols with you?" Tom retorted, patting his own jacket to show the bulge of one beneath it.
"Those," said Yasmini, standing between the skeletons and holding up her own light, "are the bones of priests, who died when the secret of the place was taken from them! My father told me they were left to starve to death. This was Jinendra's temple."
"D'you suppose they pulled that cut stone from the walls, trying to force a way out?" Dick hazarded. "The lid of the hole we came down through is a foot thick, and was set solid in cement; they couldn't have lifted that if they tried for a week. Everything's solid in this place. I sounded every inch of the floor with a cannon ball, but it's all hard underneath."