Ost" s shriek had told me what I wanted to know. I now knew how we could arrange to have the chamber flooded.

"Tomorrow night," I said simply, looking in Ost" s direction, "we will make our break for freedom."

The next day, as I had expected, an accident befell Ost. He seemed to injure his foot with the pick, and he pleaded so earnestly with the Whip Slave that the fellow removed him from the chain and, putting a collar on his throat, led him limping away. This would have been an unusual solicitation on the part of the Whip Slave but it was obvious to him as to the rest of us that Ost wished to speak with him alone, to communicate information of extreme importance.

"You should have killed him," said Kron of Tharna.

"No," I said.

The bull-like man of Tharna looked at me questioningly and shrugged. That night the slaves who brought the tub of food were accompanied by a dozen warriors.

That night Ost was not returned to the chain. "His foot requires care," said the Whip Slave, gesturing us toward the long cell.

When the iron door was shut and the bolts shot into place, I heard the Whip Slave laugh.

The men were despondent.

"Tonight," said Andreas of Tor, "you know the chamber will be flooded." "Yes," I said, and he looked at me in disbelief.

I called to the man at the far end of the chamber. "Pass the lamp," I said. I took the lamp and went, some of my fellow prisoners perforce accompanying me, and held it to the circular shaft, about two feet in diameter, down which the water would hurtle. There was an iron grating set in the stone, about eight feet high in the shaft. From somewhere above we heard the movement of a valve.

"Lift me!" I cried, and on the shoulders of Andreas and the slave shackled beside me, I was lifted into the shaft. Its sides were smooth and slimy. My hands slipped on them.

Chained as I was I could not get to the grating.

I cursed.

Then it seemed that Andreas and the slave grew beneath my feet. Other slaves knelt beneath them, giving their backs that the two might rise higher. Standing side by side they lifted me higher into the shaft. My shackled wrists seized the grating.

"I have it," I cried. "Drag me down!"

Then Andreas and the slave fell in the shaft and I felt the chains that fastened my wrists and ankles to theirs tearing at my limbs. "Pull!" I cried, and the hundred slaves in the long room began to draw on the chains. My hands bled on the grating, the blood falling back in my upturned face, but I would not release the bars. "Pull!" I cried.

A trickle of water from above moved down the sides of the stones. The valve was opening.

"Pull!" I cried again.

Suddenly the grating sprang free and I and it fell clattering with a rattle of chains and metal to the floor.

Now there was a stream of water flowing down the shaft.

"First on the chain!" I called.

With a rattle of chains a small man with a wisp of straw- coloured hair across his forehead snaked past the others and stood before me. "You must climb," I said.

"How?" he asked, bewildered.

"Brace your feet against the wall of the shaft," I said. "Use your feet!" "I can" t," he said.

"You will," I said.

I and his fellow took him and thrust him bodily through the opening. We heard him in the shaft, grunting, gasping, the sounds of chains scraping on stones as he began the tortuous inch by inch ascent.

"I" m slipping!" he cried, and rattled down the shaft and fell to the cell floor weeping.

"Again!" I said.

"I can" t," he cried hysterically.

I seized him by the shoulders and shook him. "You are of tharna," I said. "Show us what a man of Tharna can do!"

It was a challenge which had been put to few men of Tharna.

We lifted him again into the shaft.

I set the second on the chain beneath him, and the third on the chain beneath the second.

The water was sloshing through the aperture now, in a stream about as wide as my fist. In the tunnel it rose to our ankles.

Then the first man on the chain supported his own weight, and the second, chains rattling, began to ascend the vertical tunnel, supported by he who was third, who now stood on the back of the fourth man, and so it continued.

Once the second man slipped, dragging the first down with him, and causing the third to lose his grip, but by now there was a solid chain of men in the tunnel, and the fourth and fifth men held. The first began his tortuous ascent once more, followed by the second and third.

The water was perhaps two feet high in the cell, pressing upward to the low ceiling, when I followed Andreas into the tunnel. Kron was the fourth man behind me.

Andreas, Kron and I were in the tunnel, but what of the poor wretches on the chain behind us?

I looked up the long shaft, at the line of slaves moving upward, inch by inch.

"Hurry!" I cried.

The stream of water now seemed to press us down, to impede our progress. It was like a small waterfall.

"Hurry! Hurry!" cried the voice of a man still below, a hoarse, terrified cry. The first man on the chain had now ascended the tunnel to the very source of the water, another tunnel. We heard a sudden, loud swift rushing of water. He cried out in fear, "It" s coming, all of it!"

"Brace yourselves!" I shouted to those above and below me. "Drag the last men into the tunnel!" I yelled. "Get them out of the cell!"

But my last words were drowned in a hurtling plunging cataract of water that shattered on my body like a great fist, knocking my breath out. It roared down the shaft, pounding on the men. Some lost their footing, and bodies were wedged into the shaft. It was impossible to breathe, to move, to see.

Then as suddenly as it had begun, the cataract ceased. Above, whoever worked the valve must have grown impatient and thrown it open completely, or perhaps the sudden torrent of water had been intended as a gesture of mercy to drown any survivors quickly.

As soon as I had caught my breath, I shook the sopping hair from my eyes. I peered up into the sodden blackness, crowded with chained bodies. "Keep climbing," I said.

In perhaps another two or three minutes I had reached the horizontal tunnel down which the tumult of the water had been fed into the vertical tunnel. I found those ahead of me on the chain. Like myself they were soaked to the skin and shivering, but alive. I clutched the first man by the shoulders. "Well done!" I said to him.

"I am of Tharna," he said proudly.

At last each man of the chain was within the horizontal tunnel, though the last four men had of necessity been dragged to its level, for they hung limp in their chains. How long they had been under water was hard to say. We worked on them, bending over them in the darkness, I and three men from Port Kar, who understood what must be done. The other slaves on the chain waited patiently, not one complaining, not one urging us to greater speed. At last, one by one, the inert bodies stirred, their lungs opening to draw in the damp, cold air of the mine.

The man whom I had saved reached up and touched me.

"We are of the same chain," I said.

It was a saying we had developed in the mines.

"Come!" I said to the men.

Leading them in two lines, shackled behind me, we crawled down the horizontal tunnel.