to prove something of our story at last.

But not so. The priest opened the first door by kicking on it with his
toe, and one by one we filed along the narrow passage in pitch darkness
that was broken only by the swinging lantern carried by the man in front
and the occasional flashes of an electric torch. King, one pace ahead of
me, swore to himself savagely all the way, and although I did not feel
as keenly as he did about it, because it meant a lot less to me what the
committee might think, I surely did sympathize with him.

If we had come sooner it was beyond belief that we should not have
caught those experts at their business, or at any rate in process of
removing the tools of their strange trade. There must have been some
mechanism connected with their golden light, for instance, but we could
discover neither light nor any trace of the means of making it.
Naturally the committee refused to believe that there had ever been any.

The caverns were there, just as we had seen them, only without their
contents. The granite table, on which we had seen Benares, London and
New York, was gone. The boxes and rolls of manuscript had vanished from
the cavern in which the little ex-fat man had changed lead into gold
before our eyes. The pit in the center of the cavern in which the
fire-walkers had performed, still held ashes, but the ashes were cold
and had either been slaked with water, or else water had been admitted
into the pit from below. At any rate, the pit was flooded, and nobody
wanted the job of wading into it to look for apparatus. So there may
have been paraphernalia hidden under those ashes for aught that I know.
It was a perfectly ridiculous investigation; its findings were not worth
a moment's attention of any genuine scientist. Subsequently, newspaper
editors wrote glibly of the gullibility of the human mind, with King's
name and mine in full-sized letters in the middle of the article.

About the only circumstance that the investigating committee could not
make jokes about was the cleanliness of all the passages and chambers.
There was no dust, no dirt anywhere. You could have eaten off the floor,
and there was no way of explaining how the dust of ages had not
accumulated, unless those caverns had been occupied and thoroughly
cleaned within a short space of time.

The air down there was getting foul already. There was no trace of the
ventilation that had been so obvious when King and I were there before.
Nev