Now at the bottom of the stairs a shadowy figure of a sleeping eunuch was stretched.

Hamdi Bey spoke sharply, giving a quick order.  The black scrambled to his feet, yawned, nodded, and strode away into the main vestibule and out into the garden to investigate a shadow which the general had just reported, and when he was out of sight the general and Yussuf, with his unwieldy burden, came quietly down the stairs and turned back into a long, dark hall.

For a moment they paused outside a wide, many-columned banqueting room, and there Hamdi Bey stood listening, straining attentive ears for the faint sounds from the service quarters on the other side of the room.  He caught the guttural of a half inaudible voice, and the wash of water and clink of a dish, showing that the belated work of the reception was going draggingly on, but it was all far away and invisible.

Satisfied he went on a few steps to a pointed door set in the heavy stone.  From a nail he took down a lantern of heavy, fretted brass and lighted it, not without some difficulty, for his hands were still trembling.  Then he took from the black a cumbersome key which he fitted into the lock and turned heavily.

Drawing back the door he motioned Yussuf ahead, and followed, drawing the door shut.  Down a steep, stone spiral stair they went, and at the bottom, at the general’s order, the black set Ryder down from his shoulder and flung aside the portiere.

From its muffling folds Ryder looked out bewilderedly into the darkness about him, illumined only by the yellow flare of the ancient lantern.  The general cautioned him to silence while Yussuf knelt and untied the strip that bound his feet, then, his arms still bound, he was ordered to march on before them.

This, he said to himself, as he silently obeyed that order, this really was the time to pinch himself and wake up!  Of all the dark, eerie nightmares!  This slow procession through these underground halls, the giant black on his heels, the general’s lantern throwing its flickering rays over the huge, seamed blocks of granite foundations.

It made him think of the Catacombs.  It made him think of the Serapeum.  It made him think of those damp, tortuous underground ways of the Villa Bordoni....

They seemed to be in the wine cellars.  He saw bins and barrels and barred vaults that would have done credit to an English squire, and he reflected fleetly that wine bibbing was forbidden to Mohammedans and that Hamdi Bey was a fanatic Moslem....  Then he saw open spaces of ancient stuffs, broken tables and dismantled caiques and a broken oar.  His earlier observation of the palace had told him that it had a water gate and he thought now that they might be near some opening.

He wondered if they were going to throw him, pinioned, into the river.  He wouldn’t put it past this livid, silent, shaking man—­and yet the thing appeared so impossible, so theatric, so utterly unrelated to any of the ways that he, Jack Ryder, might be expected to end his days, that it couldn’t possibly send more than a shiver of speculation down his spine.