The high priest of sorcery (whose presence they had for the while forgotten) greeted Trent cordially in Hindustani, but it was evident that he was troubled--though the fact that his lips trembled slightly may have been due to the dampness of the temple.
Sarojini Nanjee threw a robe about her shoulders and, motioning to Trent, guided him to one side of the large golden image, to a door that the Great Magician had opened. Beyond was a courtyard. It was still drizzling and low black clouds impended. A gate was pushed open by the high priest and they emerged upon a path that ended at a gate in the nearby city-walls. If there was a guard, he was discreetly out of sight.
Outside was a low embankment, then the dark waste of the morass that girded Shingtse-lunpo. To the west, in the thin veil of rain, was a shapeless blur that Trent imagined was Amber Bridge. The Great Magician shut the gate and led the way down the embankment. The ground was not soggy, as Trent expected, and, straining his eyes, he saw the reason. They were following a barely visible road through the rushes.
Toward the shapeless blur they moved. As they drew nearer it became apparent that it was not Amber Bridge, but a pile of broken stone--a remnant of the old outer-fortifications--in the middle of the swamp-belt. When they reached the mass of masonry Trent saw that it was a portion of a broken wall, rising above nearly obliterated flagstones that formed the floor of what had once been a room, or a tunnel, under a mighty rampart--a wall that was hollowed and whose roof had fallen in. The passage thus formed was not more than three feet in width and ran for several yards before it ended in a _cul-de-sac_.
Into the narrow space between the walls Trent and Sarojini Nanjee followed the Great Magician. It was damp and smelled of freshly-turned earth. A few feet from the entrance the Tibetan paused and grunted a word to Sarojini. Instantly a saber of light smote the darkness, a ray from a very modern electric torch in the woman's hand. The Great Magician took the light from her, flashing it into the _cul-de-sac_ and upon a small stone stairway that plunged into grim depths.
Down into the bowels of the earth it carried them, into a rectangular crypt. Blocks of masonry had been torn away from one side of the wall and an irregular aperture gaped blackly. Trent observed that the stones had not been removed recently, for they were wedged in mud and grown with fungi.