He whirred the little wheel again and again before he succeeded in striking a spark that would ignite the gas, and exhaled a long breath of gratitude when the slender white flame suddenly sprang into life. Solicitously he coaxed it into a brighter radiance and turned its full beam upward, looking for the spot where he had walked over the edge of the fissure. When he found it, his mouth sagged open. “Call this hole a teapot, and I’d say I fell down the spout,” he grunted. “A pretty problem--getting out again!” In truth the problem was not pretty, but instead was as ugly a situation as any in which John Abington had ever found himself. The place was not unlike a huge teapot with bulging sides and the fissure for a spout. How deep the water was in the pool, he could only guess; considerably over six feet, he knew, because he had taken a dive of about fifteen feet and he did not remember that he touched bottom at all. As to the diameter of the pool, that too was a matter of conjecture, since the light did not show the farther rim. He leaned over, dropped a wet match into the water and watched it, edging along the rim of the pool as the match floated gently away from the side where he had fallen in. Abington’s eyes brightened. “Thought there was a current,” he said with a nod of confirmation. “Some outlet, of course. Some inlet, as well. This pool never filled drop by drop.” Carefully guarding his lamp, he worked his way along, following the match. He saw it hesitate, poise and sway like something grown suddenly fearful, then up-end and disappear under water as if invisible fingers had reached up and seized it. Abington leaned far over, flung another match into the water and saw it disappear as the first had done. He dropped his hand into the water, let the fingers dangle passively, and felt the nagging pull of the undertow. The hope of leaving the cavern by following the outlet of the pool died before it had gained more than a flutter of life. For the water flowed out by a subterranean channel which no man could follow. Abington continued around the pool, turning the lamp this way and that upon water and walls. The place was not unlike a huge cistern, roughly round and slowly drying up, judging from certain marks on the rock rim which in places sloped steeply toward the water. Presently he discovered the inlet, a small stream running down through a crack in the wall. There was no hope Whatever of getting out that way. It was here that the tinkly drip fell into the pool from a finger of rock thrust out of the fissure. Even in his urgent need of finding his way back to the surface, his scientific mind ruled Abington, for he caught himself turning the lamp rays back for a second look at hieroglyphics carved high up.