Lair of the White Worm

freely and with as little misgiving or restraint as if it had been broad
daylight.  For Adam, there was just sufficient green light from somewhere
for him to see that there was a broad flight of heavy stone steps leading
upward; but Lady Arabella, after shutting the door behind her, when it
closed tightly without a clang, tripped up the steps lightly and swiftly.
For an instant all was dark, but there came again the faint green light
which enabled him to see the outlines of things.  Another iron door,
narrow like the first and fairly high, led into another large room, the
walls of which were of massive stones, so closely joined together as to
exhibit only one smooth surface.  This presented the appearance of having
at one time been polished.  On the far side, also smooth like the walls,
was the reverse of a wide, but not high, iron door.  Here there was a
little more light, for the high-up aperture over the door opened to the
air.

Lady Arabella took from her girdle another small key, which she inserted
in a keyhole in the centre of a massive lock.  The great bolt seemed
wonderfully hung, for the moment the small key was turned, the bolts of
the great lock moved noiselessly and the iron doors swung open.  On the
stone steps outside stood Oolanga, with the mongoose box slung over his
shoulder.  Lady Arabella stood a little on one side, and the African,
accepting the movement as an invitation, entered in an obsequious way.
The moment, however, that he was inside, he gave a quick look around him.

"Much death here--big death.  Many deaths.  Good, good!"

He sniffed round as if he was enjoying the scent.  The matter and manner
of his speech were so revolting that instinctively Adam's hand wandered
to his revolver, and, with his finger on the trigger, he rested satisfied
that he was ready for any emergency.

There was certainly opportunity for the nigger's enjoyment, for the open
well-hole was almost under his nose, sending up such a stench as almost
made Adam sick, though Lady Arabella seemed not to mind it at all.  It
was like nothing that Adam had ever met with.  He compared it with all
the noxious experiences he had ever had--the drainage of war hospitals,
of slaughter-houses, the refuse of dissecting rooms.  None of these was
like it, though it had something of them all, with, added, the sourness
of chemical waste and the poisonous effluvium of the bilge of a water-
logged ship whereon a multitude of rats had been drowned.

Then, quite unexpectedly, the negro noticed the presence of a third
person--Adam Salton!  He pulled out a pistol and shot at him, happily
missing.  Adam was himself usually a quick shot, but this time his mind
had been on something else and he was not ready.  However, he was quick
to carry out an intention, and he was not a coward.  In another moment
both men were in grips.  Beside them was the dark well-hole, with that
horrid effluvium stealing up from its mysterious depths.

Adam and Oolanga both had pistols; Lady Arabella, who had not one, was
probably the most ready of them all in the theory of shooting, but that
being impossible, she made her effort in another way.  Gliding forward,
she tried to seize the African; but he eluded her grasp, just missing, in
doing so, falling into the mysterious hole.  As he swayed back to firm
foothold, he turned his own gun on her and shot.  Instinctively Adam
leaped at his assailant; clutching at each other, they tottered on the
very brink.

Lady Arabella's anger, now fully awake, was all for Oolanga.  She moved
towards him with her hands extended, and had just seized him when the
catch of the locked box--due to some movement from within--flew open, and
the king-cobra-killer flew at her with a venomous fury impossible to
describe.  As it seized her throat, she caught hold of it, and, with a
fury superior to its own, tore it in two just as if it had been a sheet
of paper.  The strength used for such an act must have been terrific.  In
an instant, it seemed to spout blood and entrails, and was hurled into
the well-hole.  In another instant she had seized Oolanga, and with a
swift rush had drawn him, her white arms encircling him, down with her
into the gaping aperture.

Adam saw a medley of green and red lights blaze in a whirling circle, and
as it sank down into the well, a pair of blazing green eyes became fixed,
sank lower and lower with frightful rapidity, and disappeared, throwing
upward the green light which grew more and more vivid every moment.  As
the light sank into the noisome depths, there came a shriek which chilled
Adam's blood--a prolonged agony of pain and terror which seemed to have
no end.

Adam Salton felt that he would never be able to free his mind from the
memory of those dreadful moments.  The gloom which surrounded that
horrible charnel pit, which seemed to go down to the very bowels of the
earth, conveyed from far down the sights and sounds of the nethermost
hell.  The ghastly fate of the African as he sank down to his terrible
doom, his black face growing grey with terror, his white eyeballs, now
like veined bloodstone, rolling in the helpless extremity of fear.  The
mysterious green light was in itself a milieu of horror.  And through it
all the awful cry came up from that fathomless pit, whose entrance was
flooded with spots of fresh blood.  Even the death of the fearless little
snake-killer--so fierce, so frightful, as if stained with a ferocity
which told of no living force above earth, but only of the devils of the
pit--was only an incident.  Adam was in a state of intellectual tumult,
which had no parallel in his experience.  He tried to rush away from the
horrible place; even the baleful green light, thrown up through the
gloomy well-shaft, was dying away as its source sank deeper into the
primeval ooze.  The darkness was closing in on him in overwhelming
density--darkness in such a place and with such a memory of it!

He made a wild rush forward--slipt on the steps in some sticky, acrid-
smelling mass that felt and smelt like blood, and, falling forward, felt
his way into the inner room, where the well-shaft was not.