Then came another rumble and the searchlight went out.
IX
Out of the Eater
Had our doom been set forth upon paper and submitted to Rose Noble himself, for his approval, I cannot believe that he would have altered one particular.
We were entombed alive: this, by our own act, with the treasure under our hand, in the knowledge of an attack upon one man and a dog, who would count in vain upon our succour.
Had we had the tools, we had no longer the strength to hew our way back: indeed, to judge from the sound, it seemed likely that ten or more yards of our tunnel had fallen in. Yet, could we have performed this unthinkable task, it would only have been to fall into the enemy’s hands.
And the other way out was barred: and beyond the bars was the shaft, the mouth of which would be sealed in less than an hour: and beyond the shaft was the well, some ninety feet deep.
Mansel was speaking.
“The first thing to do is to keep calm: the second is to break these bars. And now please don’t move for a moment, or we shall collide.”
We heard him make his way to the entrance: when he was there, he spoke again.
“Chandos, come here and lift Ellis. If I can find it, we may as well have his torch.”
At once I moved to the entrance and, thrusting my hands between the bars, seized the corpse under its arms and endeavoured to lift it up. But it was too heavy for me: so Mansel and Hanbury raised me, whilst I held it against the bars.
The torch was alight in a pocket, into which the dead man must have thrust it, so soon as he heard our chisel enter the wall; and, when Mansel had taken it out and had felt in the other pockets, he told me to throw back the body away from the bars. This I was thankful to do.
The entrance was a frame of hewn stone, eight inches thick. In this the bars were set upright, four inches apart: and, close to its foot, one was filed almost through.
We cut this in two with the chisel without delay: but, if we then expected that our release was at hand we were grievously disappointed.
God knows what smith it was that wrought that bar: but he was a craftsman that knew his mystery: and I do not believe that such art is practised today. Severed though it was, we could neither break nor bend it: and, when we attempted to lever it up with the crowbar, we bent this into a hoop.
There lay the file within reach: but we could not bear the thought of a labour so lengthy and cudgelled our weary brains to find out some other way.
Now the bars were all sunk, top and bottom, into holes cut in the stone, and, though our treatment had not displaced it, the upper portion of the bar we had cut could now be turned round in its socket and even moved up and down, and, but for the lower portion, which opposed it, it would have come down and away. Perceiving this, we determined to loosen the lower piece, in the hope that we could then raise this up, until it was clear of its bed, and thus remove the whole bar, by simply reversing the procedure by which it was undoubtedly set up.
It did not take long to loosen the lower portion, but, either because the stonework itself had settled or because, when the bars were planted, some trick of masonry was used, we could not make enough play to free this piece from its bed.
The knowledge that the water below was rising fast and that the mouth of the shaft would soon be sealed made it hard to give our minds to the problem as freely as we would have wished and easy to return to methods which we had already discarded as forlorn. And this, I suppose, was the beginning of panic. Be that as it may, I remember Mansel sitting down with his head in his hands, whilst I leaned against the wall, holding the torch and watching Rowley filing like a madman and Hanbury, with the hammer and chisel, trying to cut a channel out of the stone.
Suddenly—
“Look here,” said Mansel rising. “Why don’t we try the wall? It let us in, and why shouldn’t it let us out? And, once we’re out, we can break our way into the shaft.”
We should, of course, have attempted this long before: but I suppose it was natural that the entrance, so nearly open, should have attracted and held the whole of our attention. But now we saw that, provided the void we had found ran right round the chamber, we should be without in a moment and very probably able to make our way past the entrance without having to displace any earth. For the entrance was two feet wide: but the shaft was three.
And so it fell out.
In less than five minutes, six more stones were out of the chamber’s wall, and, when I stepped through the new opening, there was the wall of the shaft twenty inches away. To breach this was very simple, yet took longer, I think, than even Mansel had expected; for we had ruined the crowbar and dared not work too fiercely for fear of spoiling the chisel or snapping the helve of the only hammer we had. But at last we had made an opening through which a man might pass.
While Mansel and I had been working, Hanbury and Rowley had put what remained of the treasure into the bags and had fastened their mouths. This by Mansel’s direction, “for,” said he, “I know that a man can take nothing out of this world, but, so long as he’s in it, he may as well keep what he’s got.”
And there we were all
