Suddenly it occurred to him that if he could locate he spot where the water was being pumped into the cellar they might be able to stop its rising by plugging he inlet with their clothes. With renewed hope he began another tour of the walls fumbling hastily about below the water line. At last he found the place but, instead of it being a small round hole, as he had hoped, it was a four foot long iron grating through which the flood was filtering at a steady pressure. The space was to big to stop up, even if they had been able to get up the grating, so he had to abandon the idea. When he returned to the steps the water was eddying round its waist.
`I won't drown,' he told himself fiercely. `I can't. I’m not even middle aged yet. I've got years of life to look forward to. I won't choke my life out like a rat in a trap.' Yet, even as he fought to reassure himself, he knew that he would, unless he could think of some way to save himself.
Jeremiah was babbling away quite incoherently. His
muttering was the only sound perceptible in the chill, dank darkness, and as Lovelace listened involuntarily to his ravings he realised that the negro was making his supplication in Bambara or something like it : anyhow a dialect used on the west coast of Africa. Evidently he had deserted the Christian God for Voodoo incantations in the tongue handed down to him by his forebears at a few generations back when they had been shipped as naked slaves to the American plantations.
Lovelace wiped the sweat out of his eyes and went up the steps once more, With his finger tips he made a minute examination of the trap. It was evidently bolted on the upper side since it would not shift a fraction to the utmost pressure of his shoulder. The hinges too were on the upper side, although, even if they had been on the lower, he had no means of unscrewing them. The trap consisted of three solid planks and between them he could just make out faint ribbons of light by applying his eye to the cracks.
Cursing the Negro into silence he held his ear to the wider of the two apertures and listened intently. The murmur of muffled voices came faintly from above. By their tone, more than any actual words which he could catch, he judged them to be those of the Egyptian servants rather than Zarrif’s gunmen.
After a little he abandoned the attempt to hear what was happening in the room above and sat, his head buried in his hands, crouched on the top step of the ladder, his brain whirling wildly.
He tried to think sanely but he couldn't. The unceasing pulsation of the electric pump and the knowledge that with every throb it gave the water below him was creeping upward seemed to blunt his wits and shatter every attempt at concentration.
An hour had passed, or perhaps an hour and a quarter, since they had been flung into the cellar, when he raised himself and again listened at the crack in the planks above, He could hear no voices this time but,
Between the beats of the pump, a steady droning sound after a moment it began to fade but before it ceased entirely he had recognised it as the distant roar of an aeroplane engine.
It must be Zarrif’s plane; no other was likely to be n the neighborhood. That meant he had left the villa then. The blood began to pulse through Lovelace's veins at greater speed. A fierce new hope suddenly animated him to fresh action. If Zirrif had gone, his gunmen would have gone with him. Only the servants would remain and perhaps they, would prove merciful or bribable. He began to shout loudly for help and beat its fists upon the trap once more.
Soon he heard voices overhead. Those of the Egyptian servants undoubtedly. If he could hear them they must be able to hear him. He redoubled the strength of his cries before pausing to listen. To his unutterable dismay he distinctly heard them laughing. Of course! they were Zarrif’s men, highly paid, keepers of his secrets for fear of their lives, and utterly dependable. They would have had their orders to wait until the cistern was full, remove the drowned bodies, carry them down to the river and throw them in under the cover of night. Very probably they had been privy to other such slayings and regarded their part in this only as a matter of routine.
Lovelace sank down again and rocked from side to side; a prey now to the fearful imaginings about the coming moments of his death and compelled at last to .acknowledge the utter hopelessness of his situation.
Jeremiah had crept close up beside him and now burst into renewed supplications : `Oh Lawd, who did deliver Daniel from de lions' den ! Who did lead Moses by de hand when he were in de Wilderness hearken to ma prayer.'
Almost instinctively Lovelace found himself praying too. `Please God let me get out. Help me. Help me think of something. Or if I've got to die give me the strength to die courageously.'
He tried to pull himself together and stretched down his leg to test the height of the water with the toe of his shoe. It had risen a lot since he was standing in it and he judged its depth now to be about five feet.
There was nothing to be done. Nothing but wait in the grim darkness and fight to keep control of his nerves up to the last horrible moment.
Dully he wondered where Christopher and Valerie were. It must be eight o'clock or later. They were probably dining quietly at their hotel in Alexandria. Perhaps they were even speculating when they would hear from him, but they would not be worried. He had told them that it might prove difficult for him to keep in touch with them while he was with Zirrif but that he would get a message through somehow. The arrangement was that they should remain in Alexandria for another three days unless they received instructions from him to the contrary. They would go to bed confidently expecting to hear from him tomorrow or the day after; but by the time they were asleep tonight he would be dead.
Jeremiah had fallen silent at last and, as Lovelace realised it, he remembered what a missionary had once told him of the African negro's fundamental attitude towards God. 'It seems strange,' he had said, `that they should worship sticks and stones since they all believe in the Great Creator; but this is what they tell you, “God made the forests and rivers. We pray to them because when God had finished his work he went away and left us. How could anyone expect the Great God, who has other worlds to make and the Sun and the Stars and the Moon to care for, to remain here, just to listen to the prayers of insignificant people like ourselves?” '
At the time Lovelace had felt how well that had explained the patient humility of the negro races and that many white people might be better for considering their little personal woes less important in the sight of Almighty God.
Now, he understood Jeremiah's silence. The Negro’s thin veneer of Christianity had fallen from him and he had even abandoned as useless the deeper rooted Bambara incantations to the old familiar spirits of his tribe. He had reverted to that philosophic belief basic in his people and crouched there silent, like a trapped animal, waiting for the end,
Lovelace envied him his new found calm. His own more agile brain was still racked with regrets over the things that he must lose by death. Valerie came again and again into his mind. She was Christopher's of course, had been apparently from childhood up: still, that did not matter now and the image of her gave him more satisfaction than that of any human being he had ever dwelt upon. He wished desperately that she had not made such a mystery of their first ever meeting. He was more certain than ever that he had met her somewhere years ago and he would have liked to have known where before he went out.
The water crept over their feet and up to their ankles as they perched huddled together on the upper steps of the ladder with their heads pressed against the trapdoor. A rat scuttled past below them yet they hardly noticed it. Both were sunk in a heavy torpor; only the steady rhythmic beat of the engine now penetrated to their dulled senses.