prived them of speech or the power of uttering
a sound, or they would have shouted. As it was, however, when they
finally landed in a heap on some hard surface at the foot of the steep
declivity down which they had fallen, it was some seconds before any of
them breathed a word. Then it was Jack who spoke.

"Fellows!"

"Yes, Jack." The rejoinder came out of the darkness in Walt Phelps'
voice.

"Ralph, are you there?"

"No; I'm dead. That is, I feel as if every bone in my body had been
broken. What in the name of Old Nick has happened?"

"Thank goodness there are no bones broken," breathed Jack thankfully,
as Ralph spoke, "as to what happened, you can take your own guess on
it. My idea is that there was some sort of hinged trap-door at the
bottom of that altar, and that when our combined weight came upon it at
the time I pulled Ralph down, the blamed old thing tipped and dumped us
down in here."

"That's my idea, too," chimed in Walt. "Can't account for it in any
other way. But what is 'here'? Where are we?"

"You can answer that as well as I can," was the rejoinder. "Anybody
got a match? Oh, here; all right, I've got some, plenty in fact--a
whole pocketful."

Jack struck a lucifer, and as its yellow glare lit up their
surroundings, they could not repress a cry of astonishment. They had
landed at the foot of a steep flight of stairs, at the summit of which
they correctly surmised was the trap-door through which they had been
so startlingly dumped.

"Good gracious, did we fall down all those?" murmured Ralph, rubbing
his elbow painfully.

"Guess so. I know I feel as if I'd been monkeying with a buzz-saw,"
same [Transcriber's note: came?] from Walt Phelps.

"Well, fellows," said Jack, as the light died out, "the question now
before us is, what are we going to do?"

"Try to get out again," said the practical Walt Phelps.

"All right, Walt. Then we'd better remount those steps--slower than we
came down them--and try to reopen that trap-door. We can't leave Pete
and the injured professor like this."

The boys clambered up the steps without difficulty. They were deep and
shallow, and were cut out of the living rock. At the head of the
stairs, however, a disappointment awaited them. Try as they would,
they could not discover any means of reopening the stone trap-door in
the floor of the hollow altar. Apparently, after dumping them through,
it had closed as hermetically as before.

The flic