Dimly, very dimly, I became aware that I was being carried.  I heard voices in my ears, but what they said I could not understand.  Then a feeling of light struck upon my eyeballs which gave me great pain.  Agony ran all through me as it does through the limbs of one who is being brought back from death by drowning.  After this something warm was poured down my throat, and I went to sleep.

When I awoke again it was to find myself in a large room that I did not know.  I was lying on a bed, and by the light of sunrise which streamed through the window-places I saw the three others, my son Roderick, Orme and Higgs lying on the other beds, but they were still asleep.

Abati servants entered the room bringing food, a kind of rough soup with pieces of meat in it of which they gave me a portion in a wooden bowl that I devoured greedily.  Also they shook my companions until they awoke and almost automatically ate up the contents of similar bowls, after which they went to sleep again, as I did, thanking heaven that we were all still alive.

Every few hours I had a vision of these men entering with the bowls of soup or porridge, until at last life and reason came back to me in earnest, and I saw Higgs sitting up on the bed opposite and staring at me.

“I say, old fellow,” he said, “are we alive, or is this Hades?”

“Can’t be Hades,” I answered, “because there are Abati here.”

“Quite right,” he replied.  “If the Abati go anywhere, it’s to hell, where they haven’t whitewashed walls and four-post beds.  Oliver, wake up.  We are out of that cave, anyway.”

Orme raised himself on his hand and stared at us.

“Where’s Maqueda?” he asked, a question to which of course, we could give no answer, till presently Roderick woke also and said: 

“I remember something.  They carried us all out of the cave; Japhet was with them.  They took the Child of Kings one way and us another, that is all I know.”

Shortly afterwards the Abati servants arrived, bearing food more solid than the soup, and with them came one of their doctors, not that old idiot of a court physician, who examined us, and announced that we should all recover, a fact which we knew already.  We asked many questions of him and the servants, but could get no answer, for evidently they were sworn to silence.  However, we persuaded them to bring us water to wash in.  It came, and with it a polished piece of metal, such as the Abati use for a looking-glass, in which we saw our faces, the terrible, wasted faces of those who have gone within a hair’s breadth of death by starvation in the dark.

Yet although our gaolers would say nothing, something in their aspect told us that we were in sore peril of our lives.  They looked at us hungrily, as a terrier looks at rats in a wire cage of which the door will presently be opened.  Moreover, Roderick, who, as I think I have said, has very quick ears, overheard one of the attendants whisper to another: