bound to become if the enforced comradeship does not breed sheer, unreasoning hatred. Fitch was a big, heavy fellow, slow in his movements and his thoughts, steady as a rock, and grudging of his few words. He had saved a good part of his pay, month in and month out, more because he had never contracted the habit of spending money than because he cherished any ultimate ambition which his slow economies were designed to gratify. He drank sparingly and never touched tobacco, not even when the eye-flies made life wellnigh unendurable to a non-smoker. He was reputed never to have been in love, nor to have so much as looked sideways at a woman. Mair, on the other hand, was a short, dark, wiry little fellow, marvellously strong for his inches, active as a cat, and as volatile as a drop of quicksilver. His black hair grew low down upon his forehead, and his wide mouth and blunt features had in them the the energy of a bull-terrier and the vivacity of a London streetArab. He had little vice in him, but much intemperate wickedness, bred of high spirits and an overflowing vitality which sought blindly and crudely for some means of self-expression. His pleasures were few and primitive, and he wallowed in them shamelessly when the opportunity served. Fitch, panting in his wake, sought clumsily to mother and chaperon him. He had nursed him through bouts of fever and other ills, had shielded him frequently from the logical consequences of his manifold evil-doings, and had got him out of more scrapes than either cared to count. "There's no booking-off for me," Fitch used to grumble to himself. "Not when Tom's about. It's a twenty-four hours' shift all the time, and hard at that." Yet he took a certain vicarious pride in the other's excesses -things for which he himself had no taste; laughed with grim, slow appreciation of his mate's quickness, cunning, and ingenuity; and respected him as the better craftsman of the two. Much of their work was necessarily done in pitch darkness, the sense of touch, not the sense of sight, alone guiding them; but Mair seemed to carry an eye at the end of each nimble finger-tip. Working blindly with chisel and hammer under water, he wrought as surely and almost as quickly as if he were performing his task unhampered. Fitch knew himself to be a good, careful, and skilled workman, but he knew also that for all his plodding steadiness he was 8 child beside his small, mercurial mate, who could do more in a four hours' shift than he could accomplish in a shift and a half. Arrived at the wooden staging, the two divers prepared for business. They cast aside their overcoats, kicked off their shoes, and stood revealed clad in the thick worsted sweaters, drawers, and stockings which divers always affect. Such wear for a tropical climate was appallingly heavy and warm, and both men were already sweating freely. When inside the diving-dress the temperature of the air they breathed would soon run up to well over 90° F., in spite of the watercoolers on the air-pumps, and their work would be done in an atmosphere resembling that of the hot-room in a Turkish bath. They would, of course, be unable to wipe their faces or bodies, and while the worsted clothing would absorb most of the moisture from the latter, the red head-cap of the same material, which Bunny Fitch now proceeded to put on and to pull low down over his eyebrows, was designed to keep, at any rate, some of the perspiration out of his eyes. With Mair's help he got into his diving-dress, fixed his helmet, and opened the valve. Lifting his leaden-soled feet painfully, he began to descend into the cylinder. With his strange globular headpiece, ungainly bulk, and slow movements, he resembled a gigantic automaton worked by reluctant and ineffectual clock-work. His bare hands, red and slightly congested by the tight rubber bands about the wrists, alone retained the mobility which we associate with the alert vitality of man. Presently the muddy waters closed over him, and a little later the air-pipe ceased to pay out. He had reached bottom, and the ladder was withdrawn to give him more room in which to move and work. One and the best part of a second hour crept by, and Tom Mair, his back resting against the side of the cylinder, sat smoking his pipe on the staging above water-level, while his invisible mate toiled silently nearly forty feet below him. Mair's duty was merely to stand by on the chance of his mate needing his assistance. The space at the bottom of the cylinder, where Bunny Fitch was slowly chipping away the rock round the edges with chisel and hammer, was too confined to admit of more than one man working there at a time. The hour was near midday, and the sun, soaring high in the heavens, was a white-hot disc upon which the eye could not rest for more than a fraction of a second. The sky was white-hot, too,-colourless, yet vivid with heat. The slow waters of the river, purring around the stays and stagingpiles, refracted the sun-rays with a blinding intensity. There was not a square inch of shade anywhere, and the palmyra palms on the riverbanks, standing ankle-deep in rank, parched underwood, lifted ragged clusters of fronds that stiffened and crackled in the dry and quivering atmosphere. Bruce and most of the coolies had gone to attend to work on one of the neighbouring cylinders. Mair could see the former moving about the staging and directing the men, clothed only in a big sun-hat, a flannel jumper, and a pair of canvas shorts. Even at that distance his face and his bare arms and legs showed black where the sun had tanned them to the hue of confluent to realise what that something freckles. Mair was alone, save was; but an instant later it for the linesman-Fitch's only flashed upon him that the cylinremaining link with the outside der had sunk abruptly and world and the two Tamil rapidly a matter of, it might coolies who had charge of the be, a couple of feet, and then air-pump. as abruptly had stopped. thick Even through his sweater, the metal of the cylinder, against which his shoulders rested, was almost unbearably hot. The sweat had dried on his face, and he could feel his eyebrows stiffening and lifting as the last minute drop of moisture was sucked out of each separate hair. The sun smote down upon him mercilessly. The refracted heat from the river struck upwards with even greater intensity under the brim of his sun-hat. It seemed to him that, beaten upon by the breath of two raging furnaces, he was being slowly grilled alive. The heat was something which had to be endured actively and consciously, like pain. Sleep, in such circumstances, was an impossibility. The brain, though cruelly alive, seemed to have become fused into vapour too volatile for thought, and capable only of registering impressions. Every sense was dazed and reeling, yet combining with every other to appreciate the intensity of their collective suffering. Even blasphemy Tom Mair's most ready outlet for emotion of any kind-proved comfortless. He could only sit and gasp, like the dusty crows perching with gaping beaks on the fronds of the palmyra palms. a Then suddenly, something happened. Mair at first failed He leaped to his feet and craned over the edge. The circle of muddy water within the great iron ring was strangely agitated, its surface disturbed by swirling eddies which lapped wavelike against the sides. At the same moment came a signal from Fitch-a signal of distress and the linesman gave tongue lustily. Mair, already feeling for his diving-dress, sent a thin cry through the immensity of the burning daylight, calling frenziedly upon Bruce. He hardly knew, and Bruce barely heeded, the words he used. The tone of his reiterated outcry was sufficient in itself to awaken dismay; and in a few minutes Bruce and a party of his coolies were racing toward him in a dug-out. "Here! Help me into these damned things!" Mair cried in high excitement, fumbling the while with his diving-dress. "My mate's in trouble. What sort of trouble? Gawd knows! Careful with that ladder. No. Better let me go down without it. You may do him a hurt. The cylinder sunk sunk sudden-like. He signalled for me. Twice he signalled. No. He ain't signalling now. Hold on, old mate, I'm coming." Then, still calling encouragement to Fitch, oblivious of the fact that the latter was out of earshot, he clapped on his helmet over his red cap, and his voice died away in a sort of sobbing murmur. Bruce and the coolies helped him over the edge of the cylinder, and he sank rapidly from sight, engulfed by the muddy water. Bruce stood looking downward, vainly straining his eyes to pierce the opacity of the surface, and speculating in an agony of suspense as to the nature of the tragedy which was hidden from him by those jostling waters. The coolies crowded together, exchanging furtive whispers and fearful glances. In the tense stillness of the noontide, over land and water the heat haze danced like a company of mocking wraiths, as though it shared with this little knot of waiting men the restless anxiety which thrilled them. Tom Mair sank downward through the water in the cylinder, watched the wavelets wash against the eye-glasses of his helmet, and the light become obscured, fade, and disappear. He was now in dead darkness, and only his outstretched hands, touching the concrete walls to right and left, and thereby guiding and steadying his descent, kept him in contact with the outside world against which his divingdress hermetically sealed him. Henceforth, until he regained the surface, he had the use of only one sense the sense of touch. For the rest, he was blind, deaf, and dumb. presently a loosely packed heap of stones; slither on it, and come to rest against the side of the cylinder. Almost simultaneously his left foot found a resting-place, and stooping quickly with groping hands outstretched, he discovered that it was planted upon the prostrate body of his mate. This filled him with astonishment, and his first thought was that Bunny Fitch had fainted. He began to close the valve in the latter's helmet, so that the inflated dress might make him buoyant and easy to carry upward to the surface; but immediately a handBunny Fitch's left hand-flew to his, grasped it, and resisted it passionately. He at once left the valve alone. Then he took up a standing position straddlelegged across his friend's recumbent body, and began rapidly running his fingers over it. The whole of the bottom of the cylinder to a depth of nearly three feet was filled with rocks and chips-the débris of Fitch's chisel-work,-and on this Mair found that Bunny was lying awkwardly on his right side. "What the devil ails him?" thought Mair. "And why won't he let me raise him?" But these were questions which his nimble fingers alone could answer for him. Fitch was making frenzied, unintelligible movements with his left hand, but Mair's own fingers were too quick for the other to be able to seize them. Rapidly they ran down each of He felt his right foot touch Bunny's legs; then up his body to the left shoulder, along the neck, over the surface of the helmet, and squeezed themselves between the loose stones and the side of the cylinder, exploring the right shoulder and forearm. Then Tom Mair's heart stood still in his body. In spite of his complete blindness, his sense of touch had now given to him as accurate a picture of the position in which his mate was lying as if the sight had been burned in upon his brain. The cylinder in its sudden and unexpected descent had pinned Fitch's arm to the rock below. He was lying on his side, tethered to the river's bottom by his hand and wrist, with the whole colossal weight of the cylinder serving as fetter. a The thought of the agony he must be enduring scarred Mair's imagination like a red flame cauterising his brain, and the silence, which should have been rent with screams, became in an instant a wellnigh unendurable oppression. Yet his mind was working rapidly, and his nervous, sensitive hands were already busy searching for the hammer and chisel with which Fitch had been working. Before many seconds had elapsed he had found the latter; but the hammer, which had been in Fitch's right hand at the moment that the catastrophe befell, eluded him. It had probably been embedded by the sudden subsidence of the cylinder. At once Mair stood erect, closed the valve of his helmet, signalling all the while for a ladder, which, when lowered to him, he placed with care, so that no part of his mate's diving-dress could be pinched by the foot of it. Then he ran up it, his body buoyant with air, and was unscrewing his front glass before the rim of the cylinder was reached. Breathlessly he told Bruce what had occurred, bade him send for the doctor and his tools, seized a hammer, refixed his glass, and climbed down again into the cylinder. His idea was to try to chip away the rock beneath Fitch's imprisoned arm, and thus perchance to set it free; but at the first blow he felt his mate's whole body plunge and vibrate, even through the diving-dress, with the agony occasioned by the shock. Another blow, and Mair's arm was seized in the iron grip of Fitch's left hand. With a groan of sheer despair, the former dropped his tools. If he could only speak to old Bunny, he thought miserably, perhaps he could nerve him to endure the pain which alone could bring him release. He shook himself free, and picking up his hammer and chisel, again chipped at the rock, but he felt his blow to be nervous and halfhearted, and at once Bunny grabbed him anew. Clearly the task was hopeless. The trammels set upon all his senses save that of touch-the blindness, deafness, dumbness that beset him-raised the horror of the position to a nightmare intensity. Unheard he was crying upon his Maker as lost souls may cry from the depths of Tophet. Tears mingled with the sweat that, escaping from the |