The position had now become suddenly ridiculous, and I did not know what to do.  Everyone soon took up L——­’s attitude, and felt that they had been cheated by some one.  Indeed, they acted as if they had lost valued possessions.  They all clambered around me, and said that it was disgraceful, and that something should be done to punish the men who had brought the false information.  They became so excited that it was necessary to create a diversion by going down into that hole ourselves to see exactly what it meant.  That proved the last straw.

It was the dirtiest and most uncomfortable descent I have ever made.  Sliding down through those piles of sacks led one to a false floor, some planks of which had been forced up by the Chinese informants.  Beneath this was a short ladder, and, stepping down, one found one’s self in an immense underground chamber.  The air was so thick and dank here that it was almost impossible to breathe, and in the flickering light of the candles we could just see a confused mass of chests and boxes ranged round.  Everyone of these had been battered open.  The cunning Japanese must have been there first and taken everything.  Alone that big lump of silver had been left because of its weight.

But there was something I missed.  These ku-ping had been emphatic about the valuable weights we would find hidden—­the standard weights of China in pure gold, which were centuries old, they said, and were the same as had been used during the Ming dynasty hundreds of years before.  I asked for them—­where were they kept?  Perhaps we might at least have these.

Alas! they led me to a smaller chamber, with a curious little door formed of a single slab of stone, and pointed once again disconsolately to more rifled boxes.  These outer chests covered smaller boxes, which were of the size of the weights themselves.  I had always heard that the biggest weight of all was a square block of gold equal to the weight of a full-grown man.  I would like to have seen that, but everything was gone.  It was useless wasting any more time.

We came up again carrying some of those silk-lined boxes as explanations and souvenirs.  But our friends were now all standing round some soldiers, who had accidentally knocked aside some flags of stone, and had found a deep hole underneath.  They were now jerking away violently at some last obstruction, and finally they swept aside everything and bared some steep steps.  As we stood wondering what had been discovered, and our hopes were almost revived, far down below appeared a grimy face, and a man at last ran up, rapidly exclaiming from surprise, as he mounted to the surface.  It was one of our Chinese informants!  Then suddenly we saw the point, and in spite of our discomfiture began laughing.  The soldiers of the fatigue parties, slower than us to understand, at length followed our example; then the hundreds of small Chinese boys; then everyone else, until we were all laughing.  For we had