“You win, sir,” he answered.  “Who goes first?”

A dull reverberation shuddered the rock, the air.

“Vive Nissr!” exulted Leclair.  “Ah, now our men, they attack the city!”

“I’m sorry to disillusion you,” the Master answered, “but my explosive produces an entirely different type of concussion.  What we have just heard is the blowing-in of the treasure-crypt door.  There’s no time to lose, now.  Who jumps, first?”

“Wait a minute!” cried “Captain Alden.”  Her eyes were gleaming through the mask, with keen excitement.  “Why neglect any chance of possibly surviving?”

“What do you mean?” the Master demanded.

“Those wine-sacks!”

“Well?”

“Emptied, inflated, and tied up again, they’ll float us!  It’s the oldest kind of device used in the Orient!”

“By Allah, inspiration!  Quick, men, the wine-skins!”

Himself, he set the example.  Knife in hand, while Emilio held the lamp for him, he crumbled the seals on one of the goat-skins, then cut the leather thong that secured the neck, and quickly unwound it.  He dragged the sack to the black pit and tipped it up.

With a gulp and a gurgle, the precious old wine, clear ruby under the dim light, gushed away down the steaming shaft that plunged to the River of Night.

“Oh, faith now, but that’s a damned shame, sir!” Bohannan protested, rubbing an ugly welt on his brow.  His voice was thick, dull, unnatural.  Madness glimmered in his blinking eyes.  “With the blessed tongue of me parched to a cinder!  And wine like that!  Here, sir—­take a handful of diamonds, or whatever, and give me just one little drink!”

’"’Bristol!  Restrain that man!” the Master ordered.  “If you can’t handle him, get help!”

As a couple of Legionaries laid hands on the major, another voice spoke up.  It was that of Ferrara, the Italian ace: 

“The major is right, sir, in spite of all!  Good wine in our throats would make death less bitter.  ’We who are about to die, salute thee’—­and ask wine!”

The Master peered sharply from beneath black brows.  Discipline seemed crumbling.  Now at what might be, perhaps, the last minute of his command, was the Master’s word to be made light of?  Were his orders to be gainsaid?

“No wine!” he flung at all of them, his voice tense as wire.  “Who says we are about to die?  Why, there may be a fighting chance, even yet!  This underground river may come to light, somewhere.  And if it does, it may bear us back to day, again.

“But the confusion of wine may just turn the scale against our getting through.  No wine!  We started on that basis.  That’s the basis we’re going through on.  No wine, I say—­no wine!”

Murmurs answered him, but no man dared rebel.  Discipline still gripped the Legionaries.  The Master drove them to labor.  “Come, quick now!  Prepare a sack, apiece!  I’ll show you how!”