Worse, time was passing. The city above us was awake now; half an hour earlier we had been startled by the clop of shod hoofs ten feet over our heads as we went under a lop-sided archway that was holding up the paving stones. Once or twice we caught glimpses of daylight, and the silence of the depths was no longer absolute.
At eight-thirty I flung myself down on a flat stone. “I must stop, Holmes. For ten minutes.” I had not slept for more than a dozen hours in the four days since we had left the Wadi Qelt, and I did not sleep then, but neither was I entirely conscious. Holmes lowered himself slowly onto the floor of whatever this wardrobe-sized space was and leant back gingerly against plaster that had been flaking since the Crusaders captured the city. I closed my eyes and we listened to the vibrations of feet and iron cart wheels.
After five minutes Holmes took out his pipe. I nearly roused myself to object, then decided, The hell with it. The scent of tobacco was a common enough thing, and could enter the nether reaches from any place.
After too few more minutes I heard the familiar sound of the revolver being inspected and given a cursory wipe, then the rustle of the bag. I sighed, and sat up to receive a swallow of the water and a handful of nuts.
“We’re going to be down here forever, Holmes,” I said drearily. I had intended it to be a dry jest, but it came out a flat statement; at least there was no fear in it. I was too exhausted to worry about the roof caving in on me any more.
He spat a date pip into his hand. “I have had failures before, but none quite so spectacular as the Rock of Abraham flying into the air.”
“You haven’t had many failures.”
“Too many.”
“Such as?”
“This is a delightful conversational topic you’ve chosen, Russell. No, no; you wish to know my failures. Very well, let me think. I have had at least four men come to me for help, only to be murdered before I could do a thing for them. Granted, I later solved the murders, but that hardly mitigates the fact that from my clients’ point of view, the cases were not precisely successful. Irene Adler beat me, although that was a silly enough case. And that one with the submarine boat plans, what did Watson call that tale of his? Scott something? Howard?”
“Bruce,” I said. “Partington. And that wasn’t a failure, you did retrieve the plans.”
“I might as well have burnt them, for all the good it did. Twenty-five years ago, that was, and how many submarine vehicles did Britain have in the water during the war? We left the depths of the sea to the U-boat.”
“You think Germany stole the plans later after all?”
“I believe those plans are sitting in the War Office somewhere with a thick layer of dust on them. Yes, I do recall that story now—it also began as an act of treason by a government clerk. Wasn’t that the one into which Watson inserted some romantic claptrap about a rose?”
“I think that was in the story about the naval treaty,” I said.
“Was it? What does that matter? Why on earth are you talking about this nonsense?” He stood up and began to shovel things back into the bag.
“I didn’t—”
“On your feet, Russell. Your present surroundings are bringing out an unpleasantly morbid streak in you.”
“My present—why? Where are we, aside from being buried alive?”
“You are in a tomb, Russell. I believe you’ve been stretched out on top of a sarcophagus.”
Our obstacle course continued, turning west, south, occasionally doubling back north, but maintaining a general direction along the Haram. I thought we must have come right through the city, but Holmes said no, we had not even reached David Street, some three hundred fifty yards (on a direct line) from the Antonia cistern. We went on, and on.
Then in a dry, snug space created by the fall of some huge quarried stones we found a cache of tinned goods, some of them still in their shipping crates. They were thick with dust, those that hadn’t been kicked to one side, though their labels were still bright.
“I thought so,” Holmes muttered. “Bey must have caught himself some smugglers and learnt the route from them. Under interrogation in the Old Serai, no doubt, during the war. Food was scarce, and smugglers sprang up by the dozen—we may find who they were when we investigate the house with the cellar door above the Cotton Grotto. Bey tucked the route away in the back of his mind, waiting until he might need it. By the looks of it, he’s not been down here more than half a dozen times.” He stopped, and held up a hand. “Did you hear a voice?” he asked, then turned out the lamp.
I strained my ears, and was about to say that I hadn’t, when it came again, a high-pitched and unintelligible cry that wafted, not from the street overhead but out of the hole ahead of us. It sounded like a child.
Silently, and using brief bursts from the torch, we gathered our things and began to sidle down the passage, in this case a narrow space between two walls, or rather, what had once been walls and were now foundations. The child sound came and went, and another sound as welclass="underline" the trickle of moving water. It grew more distinct, and then Holmes stopped.
“We’ve run out of floor,” he breathed at me, and, curling his free hand around the torch to make a tight beam, he flicked it briefly at the ground and again at the space ahead of us, and then we stood in the dark and thought.
There was no space ahead. At our feet, or rather, about four feet below our feet, was a masonry channel with sluggish, unclean-looking water in it. The large, flat covering stone had fallen into the channel, and it was the faint riffling noise from the water as it dribbled over the stone that we had heard.
The voices were definitely travelling down this channel, and now that we were above it, they became clearer: still no words, not that I could make out, but they separated themselves into two, possibly three children, calling and shouting at each other. The normality of the sound was completely unexpected, and I racked my brain to think where…
“The bath!” I said aloud. Ignoring Holmes’ shushing noises, I tried to pull the recollection of my feverish reading of the Baedeker’s guide. I whispered, “This must be the Hamman es-Shifa. It’s a big pool of rain-water set deep in the ground just south of the Souk el-Qattanin. It has a channel leading out of the south-western end of it, three feet by five, something like that.”
“Do you wish to investigate, or shall I?”
“I’ll go,” I said reluctantly.
“I must say I am coming to appreciate this system,” he remarked, the humour in his voice clear despite the low volume. “Why did it never before occur to me to have a vigorous young assistant to do what the Americans call my ‘dirty work’?”
“I’m your partner, not your assistant,” I snapped. “And you’ll have to let me past.”
“There’s a foothold on the other side; I’ll perch there. Ready?”
“Just a moment.” It was not easy to choose between letting myself into the water with no clothes, thus reserving a source of relatively dry warmth for after my immersion, or with clothes on, so as to keep the filthy walls away from my skin. In the end I couldn’t face complete nakedness, so I left my long, loose undershirt on, and dropped everything else into a heap. Holmes shot the light on and stepped forward onto the channel’s opposite side wall; I eased myself down into the freezing water and went instantly numb.
“Do you need the torch?” he asked.
“Actually, there’s a bit of light in one direction. I’ll go that way first.” There was light, beyond a bend in the channel, and I made for it, trying hard to keep my face above the water even if it meant rubbing the back of my turban along the greasy stones overhead. I came to the bend, and I was so entranced by the slice of light that beamed at me from fifty feet away and the simple noises of the two children splashing and shouting that I nearly missed the concealed opening.