With his trap-doors
the monster was responsible for endless tragedies of all kinds.
He hit upon astonishing inventions. Of these, the most curious,
horrible and dangerous was the so-called torture-chamber. Except
in special cases, when the little sultana amused herself by inflicting
suffering upon some unoffending citizen, no one was let into it
but wretches condemned to death. And, even then, when these had
"had enough," they were always at liberty to put an end to themselves
with a Punjab lasso or bowstring, left for their use at the foot
of an iron tree.
My alarm, therefore, was great when I saw that the room into
which M. le Vicomte de Chagny and I had dropped was an exact
copy of the torture-chamber of the rosy hours of Mazenderan.
At our feet, I found the Punjab lasso which I had been dreading
all the evening. I was convinced that this rope had already done
duty for Joseph Buquet, who, like myself, must have caught Erik one
evening working the stone in the third cellar. He probably tried it
in his turn, fell into the torture-chamber and only left it hanged.
I can well imagine Erik dragging the body, in order to get rid of it,
to the scene from the Roi de Lahore, and hanging it there as an example,
or to increase the superstitious terror that was to help him
in guarding the approaches to his lair! Then, upon reflection,
Erik went back to fetch the Punjab lasso, which is very curiously
made out of catgut, and which might have set an examining
magistrate thinking.
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