His eyes were closed, his lips bloodless, and through the grime his
face was gray. With a gasp of horror she thought he was dead, but when
she put her hand under his waistcoat she could feel the faint flutter
of his heart. He had an electric torch somewhere in his pocket, he had
told her, and she began to search. It necessitated moving him slightly
and as she did so he groaned. The lamp was in the tail pocket of his
frock-coat, a square, flat lamp, of a type usually to be found in
every room of Fossaway Manor.
She thought at first that the unconscious man carried two, but found
that the second package was a spare battery. Switching on the light,
she examined the roof above the broken stairs. She saw it was the
underside of a slab of wood. From here she could see the rollers on
which the table ran; stout things of wood. Near the head of the stairs
two large wooden grips projected downward, rather like the butts of
huge Browning pistols, and she guessed that by this means the table
was drawn back from below.
When she looked at Harry again he was staring upward with wondering
eyes.
“What happened?” he asked.
“We must have fallen through a trap,” she said. “Do you think you
could reach those handles?” She pointed to them.
He rose unsteadily to his feet, replaced his spectacles which had been
knocked off in his fall, and looked at the butts. Only two of the
treads remained intact. He tried one, but it broke under his feet and
the supporting posts were sagging.
“I can’t reach that,” he said. “It must be twelve feet high.”
Then she noticed his wound and made him sit down while she dressed it
with a strip of silk torn from her skirt.
“How on earth did we get into this beastly place?” he asked,
wondering. “Where are we?”
“We’re under the Abbey,” she said, and his frown ended in a grimace of
pain.
“Where is Dick?” he asked.
“He is up there, I think,” she said.
And yet why should Dick be there? He would not know his way into the
lower chamber, she thought, with a sinking heart.
“Do you think you can walk?”
He looked round in dismay.
“I can walk all right, but whither?”
“Let us try the left-hand passage first,” she suggested, and he was
agreeable.
The left-hand passage, they found, was a steep ascent which turned
continuously to the left. It was like one of those corkscrew tunnels
through which she had travelled in Switzerland, where the train
burrows its way upward in the heart of the solid rock. Was it above
Montreux or on Pilatus? She was too tired to think.
At the first turn she stopped. She had seen a glimmer of light, and,
making an inspection, she found a square hole, cut apparently in the
rock; the further end was covered with hanging weeds, and through
these she saw the light distinctly, a faint yellow glow. They
continued their climb, and presently came to another small opening.
Here, then, was one of the sources of air supply, though little came
this way, for when she lit a match before it the flame scarcely
wavered.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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