he
task--to figure out a plan.

He knew by now that the four he had come to rescue were hidden
underneath the powder-magazine, and he could see the magazine itself.
But he could think of no way of rescuing them, for the city absolutely
boiled with frantic, mixed-up castes and creeds picked at random, and
thrown in at random from the whole of India. A mouse could not have
passed through the streets undetected! And yet, from a soldier's point
of view, there were certain fascinating details to be noticed about
that powder-magazine. In the first place, it had been constructed for
a granary by an emperor who never heard of Joseph, but who had the same
ideal plan for cornering the people's food-supply. And since labor had
been unlimited, and cheap, he had gone about building the thing on the
most thoroughly unpractical and most pretentious plan that he and his
architects could figure out. It was big enough to hold about ten times
as much grain as the province could grow in any one year of plenty. And,
since that was the least practical and most ungranary-like shape, he had
caused it to be built like an enormous beehive, with a tiny platform at
the top.

Winding round and round the huge stone dome, and on the outside, was a
six-foot-wide trail, which was the elevator. Up this, each with a sack
or a basket on his head, the population was to have been induced to run
in single file, dumping its hard-won corn into the granary through an
opening at the top until the granary was full.

The emperor died--by poison--before he could see his cherished project
put into execution, but he had been a very thorough calculator, and
a builder who believed in permanency. He had foreseen that when the
granary was full, and the screw-jacks were turned beneath the cost of
living, there would probably be efforts made by unwashed, untutored,
unenlightened mobs to rape his storehouse. So he had made the little
platform at the top a veritable fortress of a place, such as a handful
of men could hold against a hundred thousand.

There was no known entrance to the granary above ground, except on the
ground level, where a huge stone gateway frowned above a teak-and-iron
door. Above that door there were galleries, and fortalices and cunningly
invented battlements in miniature, from behind whose shelter a resolute
defending-party could pour out a hundred different kinds of death on a
hungry crowd. The place was naturally fire-proof and naturally cool--a