holly helpless, that she
had wit and spirit and courage, and that somehow she would manage to
quell the storm; she might persuade Hamdi to their story, make him
remember that this was the twentieth century wherein one does not go
about immuring inconvenient trespassers as in the earlier years of
the Mad Khedive--years which had probably formed the general's
impulses--but in telling himself this there was no comfort for the
thought of the price that Aimee would have to pay.

It was pleasanter to pretend that Hamdi was really only joking, in a
shockingly exaggerated, practical way, and that presently, when the
suitable time had elapsed, he would present himself, smiling, to end
the ghastly, antiquated jest.

For some time he continued to tell himself that.

And then suddenly he told himself that the time for intervention had
surely come. It was very hard to breathe.

The next minute he was assuring himself that this was merely some
devil's trick of his apprehensive imagination. There must be a
great deal of air left.... But he was distressingly ignorant of the
contents of air, and his calculations were lamentably unsupported by
any sound basis of fact.

Mistake, not to have gone in for chemistry and physics. A chap who'd
done time in those subjects wouldn't now be rocking with suspense;
he'd comfortably and satisfactorily know just how many hours,
minutes and seconds were allotted before his finish and he could
think his thoughts accordingly.

Undoubtedly, so he insisted to himself, there was air enough here to
last him till morning. This gasping stuff was all imagination. He
wanted to keep cool and quiet. But for all his reassurance there
_was_ something a little queer with his lungs, and his heart was
lurching sickeningly in his side, like a runaway ship's engine.

And then he heard his own voice repeating very tonelessly, "O God, O
God," and the horror of it all came blackly over him and a feeling
of profound and awful sickness....

It _was_ a sound. The faintest scraping and knocking without that
wall. It went through him like an electric current.... And then a
roar burst from him that fairly split his ears, the reaction of his
quivered nerves and racking fears of his uncertainties, his
tightening terrors.

But now--nothing. He could not hear a thing. A delusion? A torture
of his final hours?... No, it came again. More definitely now, a
little grinding and scraping.

Faster and faster, a muffled, driving