They became less free with their opinions.
So we all walked around the alligator pool by a passage that the priest showed us, and one by one we entered all the caves in which King and I had seen the fakirs and the victims undergoing torture.
The caves were the same, except that they were cleaner, and the ashes had all been washed away.

There was nobody in them; not one soul, nor even a sign to betray that any one had been there for a thousand years.
There were the same cells surrounding the cavern in which the old fellow had sat reading from a roll of manuscript; but the cells were absolutely empty.

I suggested taking flashlight photographs and fingerprint impressions of the doors and walls.

But nobody had any magnesium, and the policemen said the doors might have been scrubbed in any case, so what was the use.

And the priest with the lantern sneered, and the others laughed with him, so that King and I were made to look foolish once more.
Then we all went up to the temple courtyard, and descended the stairs through the hole in the floor of the cupola-covered stone platform.