man, do wait a
minute. I'm making fast the kodak and the flashlight apparatus on the
end of the rope. Pull them up, and just make me half a dozen exposures,
there's a good fellow."

"Oh, all right," I said, and hauled the things up, and got them inside.
The photographs would be absolutely dull and uninteresting, but that
wouldn't matter to Coppinger. He rather preferred them that way. One has
to be careful about halation in photographing these dark interiors, but
there was a sort of ledge like a seat by the side of each doorway, and
so I lodged the camera on that to get a steady stand, and snapped off
the flashlight from behind and above.

I got pictures of four of the chambers this way, and then came to one
where the ledge was higher and wider. I put down the camera, wedged it
level with scraps of stone, and then sat down myself to recharge the
flashlight machine. But the moment my weight got on that ledge, there
was a sharp crackle, and down I went half a dozen inches.

Of course I was up again pretty sharply, and snapped up the kodak just
as it was going to slide off to the ground. I will confess, too, I was
feeling pleased. Here at any rate was a Guanche cupboard of sorts, and
as they had taken the trouble to hermetically seal it with cement, the
odds were that it had something inside worth hiding. At first there
was nothing to be seen but a lot of dust and rubble, so I lit a bit of
candle and cleared this away. Presently, however, I began to find that
I was shelling out something that was not cement. It chipped away, in
regular layers, and when I took it to the daylight I found that each
layer was made up of two parts. One side was shiny staff that looked
like talc, and on this was smeared a coating of dark toffee-coloured
material, that might have been wax. The toffee-coloured surface was
worked over with some kind of pattern.

Now I do not profess to any knowledge on these matters, and as a
consequence took what Coppinger had told me about Guanche habits and
acquirements as more or less true. For instance, he had repeatedly
impressed upon me that this old people could not write, and having this
in my memory, I did not guess that the patterns scribed through the
wax were letters in some obsolete character, which, if left to myself,
probably I should have done. But still at the same time I came to
the conclusion that the stuff was worth looting, and so set to work
quarrying it out with the heel of my boot and