The lanterns illuminated the place completely, and the two men looked about, searching for some new trace of a living being.  The yellow light fell only on the remains of men dead long ago.  Some of the bones lay as they had lain since then, when the drowned bodies had gently reached the floor as the “lost water” subsided.  Malipieri had not touched them, nor Masin either.  Two skeletons lay at full length, face downwards, as a drowned body always sinks at last, when decay has done its loathsome work.  A third lay on its side, in a frightfully natural attitude, the skull a little raised up and resting against the cemented wall, the arms stretched out together, the hands still clutching a rusty crowbar.  This one was near the entrance, and if, in breaking their way in, Malipieri and Masin had not necessarily destroyed the cement on each side of the slit, they would have found the marks where the dead man’s crowbar had worked desperately for a few minutes before he had been drowned.  Malipieri had immediately reflected that the unfortunate wretch, who was evidently the mason of whom Sassi had told him, had certainly not entered through the aperture formerly made from above in the outer chamber, since the narrow slit afforded no possible passage to the well.  That doubtless belonged to some other attempt to find the treasure, and the fact that the mason’s skeleton lay inside would alone have shown that he had got in from above, most likely through a low opening just where the dome began to curve inward.  A further search had discovered some bits of wood, almost rotted to powder, which had apparently once been a ladder.

A much less practised eye than the architect’s would have understood at a glance that if a living man were let down through the shaft in the centre of the dome, and left on the floor, he could not possibly get up even as far as the other hole, since the smooth cement offered not the slightest hold; and that if the outflow of the stream from the first chamber were arrested, the water would immediately fill it and rise simultaneously in the well, to drown the victim, or to strip his bones by its action, if he had been allowed to die of hunger or thirst.  It was clear, too, that if the latter form of death were chosen, he must have suffered to the last minute of his life the agony of hearing the stream flowing outside, not three paces from him, beyond the slit.  Human imagination could hardly invent a more hideously cruel death-trap, nor one more ingeniously secret from the world without.

The unhappy mason’s ladder had perhaps broken with his weight, or his light had gone out, and he had then been unable to find the horizontal aperture, but he had probably entered through the latter, when he had met his fate.  The fact was, as Malipieri afterwards guessed, that the hole through the vault outside had been made hastily after the accident, in the hope of recovering the man’s body, but that it had been at once closed again because it appeared to open over a deep pit full of still water.