cate keys.
Even in Tottenham Court Road a couple of ingenious persons had burnt a
hole in a guaranteed safe by means of common gas at three and threepence
per thousand cubic feet. These surprises could not occur at Hugo's. His
Safe Deposit really was what it pretended to be. All contingencies were
provided for. It was the final retort of virtue to vice.

You approached it by a door of quite ordinary appearance (no one cares
to be seen leaving what is obviously a safe deposit), and you signed
your name before entering a lift. You descended forty feet below the
surface of the earth, gave a password on emerging from the lift,
traversed a corridor, and at length stood in front of the sole entrance
to the Safe Deposit. A guardian, when you had signed your name again,
unlocked three unpickable, incombustible, and gunpowder-proof locks in a
massive steel door, and you were admitted, assuming always that the hour
was between nine and six. Out of hours and on Saturday after-noons and
on Sundays a time-lock rendered it utterly impossible for any person
whatever to turn any key in the Safe Deposit. Once the lock was set,
Hugo himself could not have entered, not even to save the British Empire
from instant destruction, until the time-lock had run its course.

You found yourself in an electrically lighted world of passages built in
flashing steel, with floors of steel and ceilings of steel--a world
where the temperature was always 65 deg.. Every passage was separated from
every other passage by steel grilles, and at intervals uniformed and
gigantic officials wandered about with impassive, haughty faces--faces
that indicated a sublime confidence in the safety of the multifarious
riches committed to their care. You might have guessed yourself in the
fell grip of the Inquisition. As a fact, you were in something far more
fell. You were in a vast chamber of steel, and that chamber was itself
enclosed on all sides by three feet of solid concrete. No thief could
tunnel or mine you without first getting through the District Railway on
the one hand, or the main drainage system of London on the other. No
thief could rifle you by means of duplicate keys, for no vault and no
safe could be opened except in the presence of the head guardian, who
possessed a key without which the renter's key was useless. No tricks
could be played with the gas, because there was no gas, and the electric
light could only be turned off or on from the top of the lif