-but have no recollection of the end of my fall--of
the shock marking the drop. I only remember fighting for my life
against a stifling something which had me by the throat. I knew that I
was being suffocated, but my hands met only the deathly emptiness.

Into a poisonous well of darkness I sank. I could not cry out. I was
helpless. Of the fate of my companions I knew nothing--could surmise
nothing. Then . . . all consciousness ended.

CHAPTER XXV

I WAS being carried along a dimly lighted, tunnel-like place, slung,
sackwise, across the shoulder of a Burman. He was not a big man, but
he supported my considerable weight with apparent ease. A deadly
nausea held me, but the rough handling had served to restore me to
consciousness. My hands and feet were closely lashed. I hung limply
as a wet towel: I felt that this spark of tortured life which had
flickered up in me must ere long finally become extinguished.

A fancy possessed me, in these the first moments of my restoration to
the world of realities, that I had been smuggled into China; and as I
swung head downward I told myself that the huge, puffy things which
strewed the path were a species of giant toadstool, unfamiliar to me
and possibly peculiar to whatever district of China I now was in.

The air was hot, steamy, and loaded with a smell as of rotting
vegetation. I wondered why my bearer so scrupulously avoided touching
any of the unwholesome-looking growths in passing through what seemed a
succession of cellars, but steered a tortuous course among the bloated,
unnatural shapes, lifting his bare brown feet with a catlike delicacy.

He passed under a low arch, dropped me roughly to the ground and ran
back. Half stunned, I lay watching the agile brown body melt into the
distances of the cellars. Their walls and roof seemed to emit a faint,
phosphorescent light.

"Petrie!" came a weak voice from somewhere ahead. . . . "Is that you,
Petrie?"

It was Nayland Smith!

"Smith!" I said, and strove to sit up. But the intense nausea overcame
me, so that I all but swooned.

I heard his voice again, but could attach no meaning to the words which
he uttered. A sound of terrific blows reached my ears, too. The
Burman reappeared, bending under the heavy load which he bore. For, as
he picked his way through the bloated things which grew upon the floors
of the cellars, I realized that he was carrying the inert body of
Inspector Weymouth. And I fou