I gathered the living spirit within me and looked him in his eyes.

“Yes,” I said steadily.

“Allah! but here is a woman a man may serve without shame to his beard!” quoth The Jinnee, wagging his old white head.  And with Boris stretched beside him he resigned himself to wait with the tireless patience of the East.

If the other passages had been narrow, that which we now entered was worse.  It was so narrow that the wall on each side seemed about to close in and crush us, like those frightful sliding walls that became a living coffin for the victims of medieval cruelty.  Always one was confronted by solid brick walls; and to turn back was to meet others seemingly risen to cut off all escape.  For this passage follows the simple and yet intricate pattern of the Greek key.  Thus: 

    [Illustration:  Plan of Passage and Secret Chamber]

I fancied myself doomed to spend a frightful eternity of burrowing through brick wormholes which led nowhere.  I lost all sense of location, time, and direction.  I wasn’t even sure of my own identity any more:  things like this couldn’t happen to a woman named Smith!  Just when I reached the stage where I was ready to drop down and lie there unmoving until I died, he turned his head and gave me a comradely smile of assurance and trust.  I plucked up heart of grace and staggered on.  Of a sudden he stopped.  The pale circle of the flash-light moved up, inch by inch, steadied, and stayed on one spot.

I found myself staring fixedly at the old and familiar enough symbol of the rayed eye within the triangle.  It was not commonplace or familiar set up there in that secret and awesome place and seen by a pale light.  There was about it a stark and stern solemnity, such as suggested the winged circle of immortality carved above the rock-hewn doors of the tombs of Egyptian kings.  Higher than a tall man’s head, it was painted on bricks of a lighter hue than the surrounding ones, and when the light touched it it seemed to leap out of the dark like a thing alive, a thing that watched with an unwinking and terrifying intensity.

I remembered Shooba’s savage chant of the One Eye that his Snake had shown him; and the doggerel verse on the frayed paper in Freeman’s diary.

“The Watcher in the Dark!” I stammered; “the Watcher in the Dark!  Why—­why, that paper was the Key itself!”

“Exactly.  And a very simple key, though it took me a heartbreaking length of time to turn it.  The cipher was easy enough.  It falls apart into the figures three, five, seven, and nine; it was also the simplest train of reasoning to apply these figures to the column of dots.  Only, I hadn’t the remotest idea what the dots themselves represented.  Nor did it occur to me that the tortuous turnings of any of the passageways of Hynds House might follow the pattern of the Greek key, until The Author called your attention to the design over the outside windows.  Clever man, The Author!