“Right you are, Brick,” agreed Don soberly. “If we’d fallen in there, there wouldn’t have been anything left but a grease spot. We can’t go any further, and we might as well go back.”
“That must be where the g—the creature lives,” observed Teddy, as they again reached the large room.
“I’m glad you didn’t say ‘ghost’ that time,” laughed Don. “Yes, that’s the spot it seemed to come from.”
The mere fact that they had tried to “take the bull by the horns,” as Teddy put it, was in itself a bracing element, and they had less trouble in getting to sleep than they had had the night before.
But the morning brought with it the grim fact that they were face to face with actual starvation. Their last morsel of food and last drop of water, miserably insufficient as they were, disappeared. They were suffering intensely, and each was shocked as he looked at the sunken cheeks and hollow eyes of the other.
Their thirst, especially, was overpowering. The tightening of their belts helped in some degree to make them forget their hunger, but no such resource could abate their thirst.
They were tormented with visions of sparkling springs and flowing rivers. Their thoughts went back to that night on the balcony of Phalos’s villa when they heard the tinkling of the fountains in the courtyard and watched the ripples on the surface of the Nile. There, was water in plenty. What would they not have given now for a single drop to moisten their cracked lips and swollen tongues!
“We’ve just got to find our way out to-day, old boy,” said Don in desperation. “Another day or two and we’ll be too weak to do anything but lie here and die.”
They started out, summoning all their energy and examining every room and every passage that seemed to offer the slightest chance of an exit. But the morning dragged away without result, and with every hour they grew more feverish and weak.
About noon, as nearly as they could guess from the light, Don’s eyes lighted on a stone that seemed to have fallen slightly away from its fellows in the corner of a passage. He grasped it, and it gave slightly under his hand.