The worst of it was, that their suggestions were so practical. Obviously it was our duty to at once take all precautions. I consequently took off my clothes, and removing the lid of the cistern, I was let down through a hole in the floor into the waters below. In my descent I re-opened the wounds in my hands, and it was in no very cheerful mood that I found myself in darkness, with water up to my shoulders. I moved cautiously about, trying to imagine our feelings if fate drove us to this chilly and conventional hiding-place while detectives were conducting a search for us above. Then I barked my foot on something hard, and stooping down through the water I picked up a large block of pumicestone, which was doubtless the forger's engraving die. Something scurried on an unseen ledge; a rat no doubt. I felt I had seen enough of the cistern. Groping my way back to the lid, my fingers touched a little thing that cracked under them, and instantly I felt a stinging pain. Whether it was a beetle or a sleepy wasp I did not stop to inquire. "Lemme get out," I bleated through the hole in the floor. . . . "Robin," I said, when I was safe once more, "if ever we are driven down there, we must take something to counteract the evil spirits." * * * * * All that morning we passed in the pantry, eating and dozing by snatches. Morning merged into afternoon, the afternoon lengthened into evening, and no policeman came. We were safe. At nightfall, after sending Hyppolite as a scout up the stairs to see that the other lodgers were not about, we ascended to our room again, and settled down definitely. Our stay, we then thought, might last several weeks, so as to give us leisure to weigh the reliability of the various routes and guides that offered. There was no particular hurry. The longer we stayed, the more likely the Turks would be to relax such measures as they had taken for our recapture. But we had reckoned without our host: the host of vermin. They were worse in this room than in any other place I have seen in Turkey, not excepting the lowest dungeons of the military prison, where they breed by the billion. Their voracity and vehemence made a prolonged stay impossible. Except for the first sleep of two hours, when exhaustion had made us insensible, we never thereafter had more than a single hour of uninterrupted rest. Throughout the long and stifling nights of our stay, Robin and I lay in the stately double bed, wondering wearily how any man or woman alive could tolerate the creatures that crawled over its mahogany-posts and swarmed over its flowered damask. Every three-quarters of an hour, one or other of us used to light a candle, and add to the holocaust of creatures we had already slain. "What hunting?" I used to ask sleepily. "A couple of brace this time, and a cub I chopped in covert," Robin would say. "That makes twenty-two couple up to date--and the time is 12.35 a.m."