He recalled, with peculiar pain, a woodchuck that he had penned up as a boy, and he hoped with extraordinary passion that the poor beast had made another hole.  Never again, he resolved, would he pen up a living creature, never again, if only again he could see the light of day and breathe the free air....

He thought of Aimee.  And when he thought of her his heart seemed to turn to water.  Useless to repeat to himself now those old reminders that he had seen her so little, known her so slightly.  Useless to measure that strange feeling that drew him by any artifice of time and acquaintance.

She was Aimee.  She was enchantment and delight.  She was appeal and tenderness.  She was blind longing and mystery.  She was beauty and desire....

Even to think of her now, in the infernal horror of this cramping grave, was to feel his heart quicken and his blood grow hot in a helpless passion of dread and fear.  She was alone, there, helpless, with that madman.

He tried to tell himself that she was not wholly helpless, that she had wit and spirit and courage, and that somehow she would manage to quell the storm; she might persuade Hamdi to their story, make him remember that this was the twentieth century wherein one does not go about immuring inconvenient trespassers as in the earlier years of the Mad Khedive—­years which had probably formed the general’s impulses—­but in telling himself this there was no comfort for the thought of the price that Aimee would have to pay.

It was pleasanter to pretend that Hamdi was really only joking, in a shockingly exaggerated, practical way, and that presently, when the suitable time had elapsed, he would present himself, smiling, to end the ghastly, antiquated jest.

For some time he continued to tell himself that.

And then suddenly he told himself that the time for intervention had surely come.  It was very hard to breathe.

The next minute he was assuring himself that this was merely some devil’s trick of his apprehensive imagination.  There must be a great deal of air left....  But he was distressingly ignorant of the contents of air, and his calculations were lamentably unsupported by any sound basis of fact.

Mistake, not to have gone in for chemistry and physics.  A chap who’d done time in those subjects wouldn’t now be rocking with suspense; he’d comfortably and satisfactorily know just how many hours, minutes and seconds were allotted before his finish and he could think his thoughts accordingly.

Undoubtedly, so he insisted to himself, there was air enough here to last him till morning.  This gasping stuff was all imagination.  He wanted to keep cool and quiet.  But for all his reassurance there was something a little queer with his lungs, and his heart was lurching sickeningly in his side, like a runaway ship’s engine.

And then he heard his own voice repeating very tonelessly, “O God, O God,” and the horror of it all came blackly over him and a feeling of profound and awful sickness....