willingness to go down there, and said he was certainly willing, and
everybody voted that "deuced remarkable," but "didn't believe the
beggar" nevertheless.

He showed us the "Pool of Terrors," filled with sacred alligators that
he assured us were fed on goats provided by the superstitious townsfolk.
He said that they were so tame that they would not attack a man, and
offered to prove it by walking in. Since that entailed no risk to the
committee they permitted him to do it, and he walked alone across the
causeway that had given King and me such trouble a few nights before.
Far from attacking him, the alligators turned their backs and swam away.

The committee waxed scornful and made numbers of jokes about King and me
of a sort that a man doesn't listen to meekly is a rule. So I urged the
committee to try the same trick, and they all refused. Then a rather
bright notion occurred to me, and I stepped in myself, treading gingerly
along the underwater causeway. And I was hardly in the water before the
brutes all turned and came hurrying back--which took a little of the
steam out of that committee of investigation. They became less free with
their opinions.

So we all walked around the alligator pool by a passage that the priest
showed us, and one by one we entered all the caves in which King and I
had seen the fakirs and the victims undergoing torture.

The caves were the same, except that they were cleaner, and the ashes
had all been washed away. There was nobody in them; not one soul, nor
even a sign to betray that any one had been there for a thousand years.

There were the same cells surrounding the cavern in which the old fellow
had sat reading from a roll of manuscript; but the cells were absolutely
empty. I suggested taking flashlight photographs and fingerprint
impressions of the doors and walls. But nobody had any magnesium, and
the policemen said the doors might have been scrubbed in any case, so
what was the use. And the priest with the lantern sneered, and the
others laughed with him, so that King and I were made to look foolish
once more.

Then we all went up to the temple courtyard, and descended the stairs
through the hole in the floor of the cupola-covered stone platform. And
there stood the lingam on its altar at the foot of the stairs, and there
were the doors just as we had left them, looking as if they had been
pressed into the molten stone by an enormous thumb. I thought we were
going to be able