But I wasn't satisfied yet. Again I bent to the withered paper. However, I learnt little more, for a great deal was illegible, though I determined when out in the daylight to scan it letter by letter till all lay clear. But I did learn the personal tragedy of the wretch whose bones lay before me. When his party had been trapped, and had wasted their energies making futile efforts to escape, futile appeals to their enemies, clamouring at the great sealed door as though their voices could penetrate it, he had set himself to search for some other way of breaking from his prison. He noticed that in the cave there was a wide pool of water which rose and sank with the tide, and so he had argued that it must communicate with the sea. In a desperate resolve he had written out his story, and corking the paper securely in a bottle he had tied it round his neck, so that if he perished his body might be found at sea, and his friends at least be rescued. Then diving into the pool he had trusted to good fortune to see him out to safety. I could reconstruct the sequel without much difficulty. He had groped his way through the water and had found the mouth of a tunnel, where, risking all, he had entered and swum for dear life. But the fates had been against him; he had been trapped in this pocket having risen and plunged again how many times I couldn't say. But I knew he had made his bid for freedom with the tide well in, for at low water having reached so far he would have won to safety unless overtaken by sheer physical exhaustion. I felt the tragedy of the thing; so near and yet so far. And the old story of the manuscript became vividly real to me with this witness at my feet of a victim trapped to death. I glanced at the end of the paper for the fellow's name. Meadows, I made out--Carey Meadows--and inscribed in thicker letters so that its impression might never fade was a prayer that if he should die, and his body be found, justice might be done on his accursed brother who had shut him there to perish: Commander Evelyn Meadows of the _Tiger_.