The powder was piled under blankets, which a chain of men handing skins of water up the passage kept continuously damp. We had no safety-lamps, nothing but the flaring, crackling torches, and one little spark on the powder in that confined space would send the lot of us into eternity. Minute after minute the wall of sandbags grew, and the sweating men stumbled along the dark passage with their loads, faces and chests grimed with the torches’ smoke and dripping with sweat. We had been there an hour and a half and more, when John ordered his sappers to get the fuses ready. “Better get along now,” he said to us. “Henga has to get his party in position, for another half-hour will see us ready. As for you, Harry and Alec, you’re doing no good here now. There’s no point in all of us going west if anything goes wrong. Besides, you’ve other people to think of. Be standing by half an hour from now.” With that he sent Henga, Alec, and me away. It was true that we three were of no particular use in the shaft, now that the less technical part of the work was completed, and my men were getting ready to leave. Nevertheless, as I followed them and Philos, filing down the passage, these reflections did not render any the more pleasant my last glimpse of John’s sturdy figure among his grimy engineers, busy with their powder-bags and fuses in the glow of the spluttering torches, when one little spark-- However, it was no good anticipating trouble; that comes of itself without any seeking. When we emerged into the daylight once more, we found Andros superintending the troops getting into position, and Henga went off to join his company. Alec again insisted on accompanying them, and left me when he saw them falling in. Our preparations drew the attention of the watching enemy above, and some heavy stones and a few arrows came down, doing but little harm, however. Presently came word that no more water was required, and the last shifts of the working parties filed out into the sunlight, grimed and blinking. Another ten minutes brought the bulk of Wrexham’s sappers. Then at last four more figures who clustered about the gateway, last of them John himself. Three minutes later there was a dull roar in the heart of the rock, and--visible to the watchers farther back, though not to us close under the cliff--a leap of red flame upon the cliff-top. A long pause to let the gases escape up the shaft, and then John, with a few men with ropes and lights, went in, for the confined space in the shaft might now be filled with mine fumes, though we hoped that the strong northerly wind blowing into the passage from our end, combined with the draught created by the great fires burning above the trapdoor, would clear out any gas formed by the explosion. And, luckily, so it proved, for almost immediately word came back that it was safe, and the storming party was to advance at once before the enemy could close the way again.