“To breathe through,” answered Rees in a tone of triumph. “It was the foul air that put out the light and overcame you and me. To go down there safely one must have air from above, like a diver. I’ve stopped up all the holes in the tubing myself, and I’ve joined our own garden hose with Mr. Long’s, which I borrowed out of his tool-shed without troubling him for permission; and I’ve contrived, as you see, a sort of loose air-tight mask at one end to cover the nostrils as well as the mouth. Provided with this, I believe I can breathe down there as freely as up here. Anyhow, I mean to try.” Sep, though not inclined to put much faith in this ingenious arrangement, and, in fact, most dismally minded concerning their chances of escaping with their lives out of the adventure, listened submissively to all his friend’s instructions, and agreed at last, with much reluctance, to be the one left at the top, while Rees was to test his own apparatus. Rees then showed his friend an old miner’s lantern which he had bought secondhand in Cardiff years ago when he was a boy. A very long rope completed his equipment. One end of this rope he tied round his waist, fastening the other securely to the bars of the iron grating; then attaching the air-tight mask over his face, with the tube depending from it, he took the lantern in his hand and began the descent. Sep’s office was to keep the tubing straight, that the supply of air might be unimpeded; also to watch the rope, and, when he saw it jerked three times, to help his friend’s return to the upper air by hauling it up with all his might. Although he had made light of the risks he was about to run in order to encourage his friend, Rees was really quite as fully aware of the desperate nature of his enterprise as Sep was. All definite hopes about the supposed treasure had, indeed, given place in his mind to the mere desire to carry on to the end an exciting adventure; for Rees, though deficient in moral strength, had just the needful dash and daring for a dangerous feat of this kind. He thought he saw in the discovery of these underground steps, not the confirmation of Goodhare’s ambitious hopes, but the foundation for them. It was, therefore, as an explorer rather than as a robber that he made this third descent.