ertheless, no trace could be found of any ventilating shaft; and that
was another puzzle--how to account for the cleanliness and lack of air
combined, added to the fact that such air as there was was still too
fresh to be centuries old.

One fat fool on the committee wiped the sweat from the back of his neck
in the lantern light and proposed at last that the committee should find
that King and I had been the victims of delusion--perhaps of hypnotism.
I asked him point blank what he knew about hypnotism. He tried to
side-step the question, but I pinned him down to it, and he had to
confess that he knew nothing about it whatever; whereat I asked each
member of the committee whether or not he could diagnose hypnotism, and
they all had to plead ignorance. So nobody seconded that motion.

King had lapsed into a sort of speechless rage. He had long been used to
having his bare word accepted on any point whatever, having labored all
his military years to just that end, craving that integrity of vision
and perception that is so vastly more than honesty alone, that the
blatant unbelief of these opinionative asses overwhelmed him for the
moment.

There was not one man on the committee who had ever done anything more
dangerous than shooting snipe, nor one who had seen anything more
inexplicable than spots before his eyes after too much dinner. Yet they
mocked King and me, in a sort of way that monkeys in the tree-tops mock
a tiger.

Their remarks were on a par with those the cave-man must have used when
some one came from over the sky-line and told them that fire could be
made by rubbing bits of wood together. They recalled to us what the Gray
Mahatma had said about Galileo trying to make the Pope believe that the
earth moved around the sun. The Pope threatened to burn Galileo for
heresy; they only offered to pillory us with public ridicule; so the
world has gone forward a little bit.

"Let's go," said somebody at last. "I've had enough of this. We're
trespassing, as well as heaping indignity on estimable Hindus."

"Go!" retorted King. "I wish you would! Leave Ramsden and me alone in
here. There's a cavern we haven't seen yet. You've formed your opinions.
Go and publish them; they'll interest your friends."

He produced a flashlight of his own and led the way along the passage, I
following. The committee hesitated, and then one by one came after us,
more anxious, I think, to complete the fiasco than to unearth facts.

But