A further search had discovered some bits of
wood, almost rotted to powder, which had apparently once been a
ladder.
A much less practised eye than the architect's would have understood
at a glance that if a living man were let down through the shaft in
the centre of the dome, and left on the floor, he could not possibly
get up even as far as the other hole, since the smooth cement offered
not the slightest hold; and that if the outflow of the stream from the
first chamber were arrested, the water would immediately fill it and
rise simultaneously in the well, to drown the victim, or to strip his
bones by its action, if he had been allowed to die of hunger or
thirst. It was clear, too, that if the latter form of death were
chosen, he must have suffered to the last minute of his life the agony
of hearing the stream flowing outside, not three paces from him,
beyond the slit. Human imagination could hardly invent a more
hideously cruel death-trap, nor one more ingeniously secret from the
world without.
The unhappy mason's ladder had perhaps broken with his weight, or his
light had gone out, and he had then been unable to find the horizontal
aperture, but he had probably entered through the latter, when he had
met his fate. The fact was, as Malipieri afterwards guessed, that the
hole through the vault outside had been made hastily after the
accident, in the hope of recovering the man's body, but that it had
been at once closed again because it appeared to open over a deep pit
full of still water.
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