Then a wave of darkness passed across my brain and I suddenly realized I was losing consciousness. Instantly I dropped my useless lamp, and holding my nose with my right hand, took a deep breath from the bag. Meanwhile I turned and started back, reeling in the darkness like a man sodden with drink. Still I had felt no pain or terror, only dread and deep gloom, now strangely fading. It must be that the Death who laired in this black hall was of a kind sort.
I had come close to him, but his shadows lifted as I breathed through the tube. Hope returned to me, almost like light in my dimmed brain, when, too weak to jerk on the line, I felt it tighten. I was being hauled by strong hands; now I could lift my feet without heavy labor. What if I should fall? The heavier-than-air gas filled the hollows like water. My head was above it, on the steps and the steep incline, but I would drown if I lay down.
Against my orders, Isabel came halfway down the outer flight of steps to grasp my hand. In a few seconds more I was in the upper passage, gulping the fresh air. I felt as alert as though newly wakened from restful sleep. Still, I could not be content till the blue sky arched over me once more.
"Did you see any demons?" asked a white-veiled Tuareg skinner, overcome by curiosity.
"I couldn't see any because my lamp went out, but I wrestled with them, and although they forced me to turn back, the gods who wish me to have the gold kept them from killing me."
"Will you try again or turn away defeated?"
"Assuredly I will try again."
"Now that is good news."
"And you, Akasani, are the bastard dropping of a she-ape," Isabel told him in sudden fury.
Yet Isabel, too, would have been shamed almost past bearing if I gave up now. Not bravery, but necessity, drove me on.
A little of the poison was in me yet, for I slept a while after the midday meal. In the evening she and I rode forth to look at game and to clear my head a little. When we returned, we found Jim whittling a stick with his big knife before our pavilion door.
"I been studyin' about 'at gas," he remarked when I crouched beside him. "What you reckon caused it?"
"There's a fault in the strata, and an earthquake or some other disturbance caused a breach that let through hot water and gases from deep within the earth. That was sometime after the hollowing out of the temple. Some of the gases were forced up by pressure into the hollow space, and I think there are two kinds, one smelling like rotten eggs and the other having faint fumes I can't identify. There's been nothing to disturb them these thousand years, and I think they lie in layers with the rotten-egg gas, the heavier, at the bottom. I think that's the killer, but if there's a gas between it and the air, it would kill, too, in time, because it will put out fire."
Jim considered briefly, then spoke. "They seek they own level like water do?"
"Yes."
"How many feet do you reckon you went down befo' you got your head under?"
"I was holding the lamp a little higher, or on the level with my head. Counting my height at six feet, the gas is between eight and nine feet deep at the foot of those three steps."
"A man can walk fifts^ feet and back, holdin' his breaf," Jim went on.
"Certainly he can."
"Supposin' we made about six ladders about fifteen feet long. I could cay in one, set it up agin' the fust pillar, and come back and get another. When I got short of air, I'd chmb one already set up. You come along behin' me and fix lights on de top of every one. It would be jest like swimmin' underwater and comin' up when we need air. We can bof do 'at."
I stopped and thanked my stars for Jim.
"Fine," I said. "But it would be like walking underwater without knowing how to swim."
"'At's right. Cap'n, you reckon all dat quarryin' of de rock was for to make a tomb?"
"I think so, but I'm not sure."
"A sepulcher ain't nothin' but another word for tomb, is it, Cap'n?"
I nodded.
"Wouldn't it be queer if we could even up part way for de Sepulcher of Wet Bones by what we find in de Sepulcher of Dry Bones?"
"It would be another turn of the wheel of fate."
Jim and I made seven ladders of light, strong acacia wood, and to the top of each we cut a notch for holding a candle-lantern. These Jim carried down into the temple and set up in turn, climbing one of them when he needed fresh air. I came behind him, lighting the lamps.
The glimmer from a middle ladder disclosed the sculpture I had half-glimpsed, half-guessed before. It was a seated figure of a god or king, the hands resting on the knees. The head bore a round cap or crown, the forehead a projected seal or emblem, and the chin a square-cut beard. The form was fully twelve feet high and lighter colored than the limestone walls. Two pairs of pillars, set opposite to each other at right angles to the colonnade, approached the statue.
A little farther on we came on four other skeletons, representing stronger fellows than the first three, but not strong enough. One had clutched a Spanish sword with an intricately worked silver hilt. One had put on a devil mask to conceal his humanity and frighten the demons away, and it was a queer adornment on his naked skull above his bleached bones.
Beyond the sixth ladder, we found three steps leading up, identical and on the same level with those we had descended into the fatal pit. Jim raised the seventh against the last pillar of the colonnade and the light I fixed showed a ramp leading to a flight of steps the same as at the opening. These we climbed boldly, lighting an eighth lamp at the head of the stairs. Now the little flames made a strange and beautiful bridge across the whole dark gulf of the temple. Their beams did not quite meet, but the darkness never quite parted them: there was a kind of a pale yellow mist between.
Carrying a lamp, I led my companion into a passage apparently identical with that leading into the temple; just beyond stood a plaster-sealed doorway. Grinning, Jim raised his ax. I nodded, and he began to break away the plaster. Underneath was a panel of some very hard wood. The ax rose and fell, the blows echoed and reechoed against the stone walls, and the hole through the wall rapidly widened. In a moment more I had crept through, Jim close behind me.
We had come out in a rock-cut room, no more than eight feet square, empty except for two black statues, about three-fourths life-size, standing sideways to the wall and close beside it, facing each other. They were carved in obsidian by an expert hand to represent men very like the Beni Amer of today; since one of them had a sword and the other some sort of halberd, I took them for soldiers. They could easily be typical of the fierce desert tribesmen who had followed some Sudanese conqueror into Egypt.
As I was noticing these things and marveling over the realistic carving of the faces—as though the sculptor had picked and perfectly portrayed two members of the king's guard—there came a dim stir in my brain that almost, not quite, brought forth some associated experience. The memory escaped, and I did not pursue it, since a profound dejection had begun to take hold of me. The room appeared the dead end of a great subterranean enterprise itself as dead as the stone. Where was the king's coffin and his gold?
Jim went tapping here and there with his ax head. I examined the floor and cast my light on the ceiling. Presently he turned to me, the whites of his eyes glinting.
"Cap'n, how long has it been since we lit 'at first lamp?"
"Not much more than an hour."
"Well, sah, I reckon we better go back and blow out em lights and start agin tomorrow. I got a headache and de pessimism. Maybe tomorrow it won't look so gloomy as it do now."