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Page 76
A few inches from our feet the floor became depressed, how deeply
I could not determine, for it was filled with water, water filthy
and slimy! The strange, nauseating odour had grown all but
unsupportable; it seemingly proceeded from this fetid pool which,
occupying the floor of the dungeon, offered a barrier, since its
depth was unknown, of fully twelve feet between ourselves and the
farther wall.
There was a faint, dripping sound: a whispering, echoing drip-drip
of falling water. I could not tell from whence it proceeded.
Almost supporting my companion, whose courage seemed suddenly to
have failed her, I stared fascinatedly at that blood-stained
relic. Something then induced me to look behind; I suppose a
warning instinct of that sort which is unexplainable. I only know
that upholding Carneta with my left arm, and nervously grasping my
revolver in my right, I turned and glanced over my shoulder.
Very slowly, but with a constant, regular motion, the massive door
was closing!
I snatched away my arm; in my left hand I held the electric torch,
and springing sharply about I directed the searching ray into the
black gap of the stairway. A yellow face, a malignant Oriental
face, came suddenly, fully, into view! Instantly I recognized it
for that of the man who had driven Hassan's car!
Acting upon the determination with which I had entered the Gate
House, I raised my revolver and fired straight between the evil
eyes! To the fact that I dropped my left hand in the act of
pulling the trigger with my right, and thus lost my mark, the
servant of Hassan of Aleppo owed his escape. I missed him. He
uttered a shrill cry of fear and went racing up the wooden stair.
I followed him with the light and fired twice at the retreating
figure. I heard him stumble and a second time cry out. But,
though I doubt not he was hit, he recovered himself, for I heard
his tread in the corridor above.
Propping wide the door with my foot, I turned to Carneta. Her
face was drawn and haggard; but her mouth set in a sort of grim
determination.
"Earl is dead!" she said, in a queer, toneless voice. "He died
trying to get--that thing! I will get it, and destroy it!"
Before I could detain her, even had I sought to do so, she stepped
into the filthy water, struggled to recover her foothold, and sank
above her waist into its sliminess. Without hesitation she began
to advance toward the niche which contained the slipper. In the
middle of the pool she stopped.
What memory it was which supplied the clue to the identity of that
nauseating smell, heaven alone knows; but as the girl stopped and
drew herself up rigidly--then turned and leapt wildly back toward
the door-I knew what occasioned that sickly odour!
She screamed once, dreadfully--shrilly--a scream of agonizing
fear that I can never forget. Then, roughly I grasped her, for the
need was urgent--and dragged her out on to the floor beside me.
With her wet garments clinging to her limbs, she fell prostrate on
the stones.
A yard from the brink the slimy water parted, and the yellow snout
of a huge crocodile was raised above the surface! The saurian eyes,
hungrily malevolent, rose next to view!
The extremity of our danger found me suddenly cool. As the thing
drew its slimy body up out of the poor I waited. The jaws were
extended toward the prostrate body, were but inches removed from
it, dripped their saliva upon the soddened skirt--when I bent
forward, and at a range of some ten inches emptied the remaining
three loaded chambers of my revolver into the creature's left
eye!
Upchurned in bloody foam became the water of that dreadful place
. . . . As one recalls the incidents of a fevered dream, I recall
dragging Carneta away from the contorted body of the death-stricken
reptile. A nightmare chaos of horrid, revolting sights and sounds
forms my only recollection of quitting the dungeon of the slipper.
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