st of the
subterranean."

She had followed him to the threshold, seeing nothing in the
blackness but the seamed blocks of stone within the lantern's rays,
afraid always to turn her eyes from him or her hand from its
outstretched pointing.

He said very quickly to her in Turkish, "If you will wait by the
door. The floor is bad and there is another lantern, here on the
wall--"

At her left he fumbled along the stone wall. She heard him mutter
... and then reach.... And then--she did not know what was
happening. For the very ground on which she stood, the solid block
of stone began to slip swiftly beneath her feet--she staggered--and
felt herself falling, falling, into some precipitately opened
abyss....

She gave a wild scream, flinging out her arms in terror, and then
cold waters closed above her, and the scream ended in a gurgling
cry.

It was no great distance that she fell. What the dropped stone had
revealed, answering the signal of the old lever in the wall that the
general had pressed, was a stone well, narrow, deep, implanted there
by some ingenious lord of the palace in by-gone days, for the subtle
elimination of friend or foe or rival.

But it was not part of Hamdi's plan to leave the young girl there
and close the obliterating stone. Scarcely had the waters met above
her head than he was flinging down a rope ladder whose upper ends
were fastened to rings in the floor and descending this with swift
agility until the waters reached his waist.

Then he leaned out and clutched the floating satin bubbling and
ballooning yet unsubmerged above the stagnant depths and drew it
towards him. As the struggling girl came gasping within his reach,
he carried her panting up the ladder again, and laid her down in the
darkness, while he drew up the ladder and closed the stone by
pressing that hidden lever.

But the stone which had dropped so swiftly, was slow and heavy in
slipping back in place, and when he turned again to Aimee, she had
ceased her choking cough and was sitting up, thrusting back the
dripping hair from her black eyes, staring bewilderedly about the
gloom as murky as any genie's cave.

The lantern light was almost out. In its expiring gleams she saw no
more inky water, but only the damp, moss-grown stones, on which a
pool was widening from her wet garments, and the half-defined figure
of the general stooping over to squeeze the streams from his own wet
clothes.

The nightmarish horror of it over