She had followed him to the threshold, seeing nothing in the blackness but the seamed blocks of stone within the lantern’s rays, afraid always to turn her eyes from him or her hand from its outstretched pointing.

He said very quickly to her in Turkish, “If you will wait by the door.  The floor is bad and there is another lantern, here on the wall—­”

At her left he fumbled along the stone wall.  She heard him mutter ... and then reach....  And then—­she did not know what was happening.  For the very ground on which she stood, the solid block of stone began to slip swiftly beneath her feet—­she staggered—­and felt herself falling, falling, into some precipitately opened abyss....

She gave a wild scream, flinging out her arms in terror, and then cold waters closed above her, and the scream ended in a gurgling cry.

It was no great distance that she fell.  What the dropped stone had revealed, answering the signal of the old lever in the wall that the general had pressed, was a stone well, narrow, deep, implanted there by some ingenious lord of the palace in by-gone days, for the subtle elimination of friend or foe or rival.

But it was not part of Hamdi’s plan to leave the young girl there and close the obliterating stone.  Scarcely had the waters met above her head than he was flinging down a rope ladder whose upper ends were fastened to rings in the floor and descending this with swift agility until the waters reached his waist.

Then he leaned out and clutched the floating satin bubbling and ballooning yet unsubmerged above the stagnant depths and drew it towards him.  As the struggling girl came gasping within his reach, he carried her panting up the ladder again, and laid her down in the darkness, while he drew up the ladder and closed the stone by pressing that hidden lever.

But the stone which had dropped so swiftly, was slow and heavy in slipping back in place, and when he turned again to Aimee, she had ceased her choking cough and was sitting up, thrusting back the dripping hair from her black eyes, staring bewilderedly about the gloom as murky as any genie’s cave.

The lantern light was almost out.  In its expiring gleams she saw no more inky water, but only the damp, moss-grown stones, on which a pool was widening from her wet garments, and the half-defined figure of the general stooping over to squeeze the streams from his own wet clothes.

The nightmarish horror of it overwhelmed her.  For a moment she could have screamed with horror, and then she felt a cold and terrible despair lay its paralyzing hand upon her heart.

Somewhere, she felt, beneath those secret stones lay Ryder, drowned ...  And she was living, in her helplessness ...  No revolver now.  That was gone ... in the water, perhaps....

There was no resource, now, no refuge....  Strength went out of her, and passive in a dream of evil darkness she felt herself being hurried, stumblingly, back through the secret corridors and the dark halls.