Lazaroff touched a brick, and a large mass swung inward, like a door. In fact, it was a door, with bricks facing it, the outer edge contiguous with the outer edge of the fixed rows, so that the deception was perfect.
“You didn’t tell me that the chamber was completed, Lazaroff!” I exclaimed in surprise.
“No, Arnold? Well, but I don’t tell you everything,” he answered.
We stepped through the doorway, and Lazaroff switched on a tiny light within. Now I perceived that we were standing in a long and very narrow space, with cement-faced walls and roof, making the chamber impervious to sound and light. It was below the level of the ground, and thus, as Lazaroff had said, earthquakes might happen above, and it would never be discovered, not even though the annex were pulled down, unless one blasted out the foundations.
The sole contents were three large cylinders of metal, looking like giant thermos bottles. Each was about six feet long—too long for a monkey, it seemed to me—and had a glass plate in front. Lazaroff drove his heel against the glass of the nearest cylinder with all his might.
“It is quite unbreakable, you see,” he said. “It will turn a rifle bullet. ‘Suffragette glass,’ the maker calls it.”
“But what are these for?” asked Esther.
“These, Miss Esther, are to convey three monkeys into the twenty-first century,” answered Lazaroff. “By instantaneously suspending animation at a temperature of twenty-five degrees, we hope to maintain the bodily organism without change until the time for their awakening comes. The problem is, whether that mysterious by-product of matter called consciousness will return.”
“How dreadful!” exclaimed Esther, shuddering.
“But the temperature will rise, Lazaroff,” I interposed, “and however carefully your cylinders are made it is impossible to hope to maintain the internal heat at only twenty-five degrees during a century.”