“It’s worse than chronic. It’s shocking.”

“It’s bloody awful.”

“What language, Elsie!”

“Leave her alone, Mabel. It’s nothing to what I’ll say in a minute if they don’t let us out of this dark hole. So it is bloody awful. Elsie’s right.”

A shriek rang out.

“Oh, my god, girls, there’s something walking up the inside of my leg.”

Seven shrieks of sympathy shrilled through the murk of the dungeon.

“What are you all screaming about? It isn’t walking up you, is it?”

Seven shrieks shrilled again.

“Strike a match, one of you. Oh, my god, it’s biting my behind now. Oh, whatever is it? Strike a match, I say.”

Trembling fingers fumbled in the pockets of shorts. By the light of two matches simultaneously struck the young woman with fat legs who had asked Ben Nevis to stand still while she focussed her camera was revealed with her green corduroy shorts round her ankles.

“Look what it is, somebody,” she adjured, wringing her hands.

A young woman with the thin nose of the born investigator inspected the posterior condition of the appellant and declared it must have been her imagination. There was no sign of snake or toad or rat or bat or beetle or mouse.

At this last word another young woman released a shuddering wail which would have made a banshee jealous. The young woman with the thin nose, startled by the sound, threw away the lighted match, which rested for a moment on the behind of the young woman who had thought something was biting her and who now by a scream comparable to the whistle of an express proclaimed her conviction that she had been right.

And that of course set off all the other young women screaming again at one another like sopranos trying to annihilate contraltos in a Mendelssohn oratorio.

It was at this moment that the chaplain and the gamekeeper reached the iron-studded oaken door of the dungeon beneath the North Tower.

“Look at that now,” said Duncan. “They were singing songs before and now they are screaming. What a lesson to human vanity! What a lesson, Mr Fletcher!”

“We mustn’t be too ready to note the effect of human vanity in others, Duncan, in case we fail to detect the effect of it in ourselves.”

This rebuke from Mr Fletcher was inspired partly by the pleasure which he as an Episcopalian clergyman took in putting a Presbyterian elder in his place, partly by his having slipped on one of the damp stones in the passage that led to the dungeon and turned his ankle rather painfully.

“Ay, ay, that’s very true, Mr Fletcher. Yes, yes, indeed. We are all as creeping things in the sight of the Lord.”

“I hope those unhappy young women have not been driven mad by terror,” said the chaplain, who was distressed by the sounds on the other side of the door.