Subsequently, newspaper editors wrote glibly of the gullibility of the human mind, with King's name and mine in full-sized letters in the middle of the article.
About the only circumstance that the investigating committee could not make jokes about was the cleanliness of all the passages and chambers.
There was no dust, no dirt anywhere.

You could have eaten off the floor, and there was no way of explaining how the dust of ages had not accumulated, unless those caverns had been occupied and thoroughly cleaned within a short space of time.
The air down there was getting foul already.

There was no trace of the ventilation that had been so obvious when King and I were there before.
Nevertheless, no trace could be found of any ventilating shaft; and that was another puzzle--how to account for the cleanliness and lack of air combined, added to the fact that such air as there was was still too fresh to be centuries old.
One fat fool on the committee wiped the sweat from the back of his neck in the lantern light and proposed at last that the committee should find that King and I had been the victims of delusion--perhaps of hypnotism.
I asked him point blank what he knew about hypnotism.

He tried to side-step the question, but I pinned him down to it, and he had to confess that he knew nothing about it whatever; whereat I asked each member of the committee whether or not he could diagnose hypnotism, and they all had to plead ignorance.

So nobody seconded that motion.
King had lapsed into a sort of speechless rage.