whelmed her. For a moment she could
have screamed with horror, and then she felt a cold and terrible
despair lay its paralyzing hand upon her heart.

Somewhere, she felt, beneath those secret stones lay Ryder, drowned
... And she was living, in her helplessness ... No revolver now.
That was gone ... in the water, perhaps....

There was no resource, now, no refuge.... Strength went out of her,
and passive in a dream of evil darkness she felt herself being
hurried, stumblingly, back through the secret corridors and the dark
halls.

CHAPTER XVI

OUT OF THE DARKNESS

There was no measure of time for Ryder in that walled coffin of
death. The seconds seemed hours, the minutes ages.

He drew quick, short breaths as if economizing the air that was so
soon to fail him; he tugged at his bonds till the veins rose on his
forehead, but the silk held and the confines of the prison permitted
him no room for struggle; then he leaned forward, to press with all
his might upon the bricks before him; he grunted, he sweated with
the agony of his exertions, but not a brick was stirred, not a crack
was made in the mortar that gripped them tighter every instant.

He died a thousand deaths in the horror that invaded him then.
Already he felt strangling, and the painful pumping of his heart
seemed the beginning of the end.

Cold sweat stood out all over him; it ran down his face in trickling
streams and his body was drenched with that clammy dew of fear.

He tried to count the minutes, the hours, to estimate how long he
would hold out....

And then he heard his own voice saying very distinctly and clearly
and dispassionately, "This thing is absurd."

It was absurd. It was idiotic. It was utterly irrational. It was an
impossible end for an able-bodied young American, an excavator of no
mean attainments, a young scholar and explorer of twentieth century
science, a sane, modern, harmless young man, to die immured in the
ancient walls of a Turkish palace--because he had invaded a marriage
reception and intervened between man and wife.

Violent death in any form must always appear absurd to the young and
energetic. And the fantastic horror of his death removed it
definitely from any realm of possibility. The thing simply could not
happen.... He thought of the amazement and the incredulity of his
friends....

Dangers in plenty they had warned him against, to his youthful
amusement--sand storms and chills and raw fruit and unb