"Is this the place you remember?" asked the inspector, shining his bull's-eye around and revealing that we were at the bottom of a kind of circular well which had on either side two low arches or culverts. From the right the water rushed in with a swirling current, and by the opposite culvert it rushed out, gurgling and filling the arch almost to its keystone. I saw that all the black slimy masonry was of long flat stones--a relic of ancient London it seemed to be. "This isn't the place where I found myself," I said, much surprised. "No, I suppose not," remarked the inspector. "This is fresh water, from a spring somewhere, and through that ancient culvert there's probably a communication with the main sewer. When you fell, you were swept down there and out into the main sewer at once--like a good many others who have come down here. It's an awful death-trap. Look up there," and he shone his lamp above my head. "Don't you see that a bar of iron has been driven into the wall--and driven there recently, too, or it would have rusted away long ago in this damp." "Well?" I said, not quite following him. "That's been put there so that the victims, in falling from the great height, should strike against it and be rendered unconscious before reaching the water. Look. There's a bit of white stuff on it now--like silk from a lady's evening dress!" And sure enough I saw at the end of that iron bar a piece of white stuff fluttering in the draught, the grim relic of some unfortunate woman who had gone unconsciously to her death! The dank, gruesome place horrified me. Its terrible secrets held all three of us appalled. Even Pickering himself shuddered. "To explore further is quite impossible," he said. "That culvert leads into the main sewer, so we must leave its exploration to the sewermen. Lots of springs, of course, fall into the sewers, but the exact spots of their origin are unknown. They were found and connected when the sewers were constructed, and that's all. My own opinion," he added, "is that this place was originally the well of an ancient house, and that the blackguards discovered it in the cellar, explored it, ascertained that anything placed in it would be sucked down into that culvert, and then they opened up a way right through to the stairs." The inspector's theory appeared to me to be a sound one. I expressed fear of the rising of the water with the automatic flushing of the sewers, but he pointed out that where we stood must be on a slightly higher level, judging from the way the water rushed away down the culvert, while on the side of the well there was no recent mark of higher water, thus bearing out his idea of a spring.