“Yes, Baas. I thought the Baas would say that, since we are all fools in our different ways, and how can any one dig out of his heart the folly that his mother put there before he was born? Therefore, since the Baas is a fool, or in love with the Lady Sabeela because she is so pretty—I don’t know which—we must make another plan and try to get ourselves killed in carrying it out.” “What plan?” I asked, disregarding his crude satire. “I don’t know, Baas,” he said, staring at the roof. “If I had something to drink, I might be able to think of one, as all this wet has filled my head with fog, just as my stomach is full of water. Still, Baas, do I understand the Baas to say that if that stone gate were broken the lake would flow in and flood this place, also the Cave of Heu-Heu, where all the priests and their wives will be gathered worshipping him?” “Yes, Hans, so I believe, and very quickly. As soon as the water began to run it would tear away the wall on either side of the sluice and enter in a mighty flood; especially as now the rain is again falling heavily.” “Then, Baas, we must let the stone fall, and as we are not strong enough to do it ourselves, we must ask this to help us,” and he produced from his bag the two pounds of powder done up in stout flasks of soldered tin as it had left the maker in England. “As I am called Lord-of-the-Fire, the priests of Heu-Heu will think it quite natural,” he added with a grin. “Yes, Hans,” I said, nodding, “but the question is—how?” “I think like this, Baas. We must pack these two tins tight into that hole in the rock door beneath the pin with the help of little stones, and cover them over thickly with mud to give the powder time to work before the tins are blown out of the hole. But first we must bore holes in the tins and make slow matches and put the ends of them into the holes. Only how are we to make these slow matches?” I looked about me. There on a shelf in the room stood the clay lamps with which it was lighted at night, and by them lay a coil of the wick which these people used, made of fine and dry plaited rushes, many feet of it. “There’s the very stuff!” I said. We got it down, we soaked it in a mixture of the native oil, mixed with gunpowder that I extracted from a cartridge, and behold! in half an hour we had two splendid slow matches that by experiment I reckoned would take quite five minutes to burn before the fire reached the powder. That was all we could do for the moment.