The young men that Daniel hired went down that hole with bags on their backs (nothing bulky enough to draw the notice of the turnkeys) and came up empty-handed. They constructed a wooden ladder down below so that they might re-ascend to the privy without having to use climbing-ropes (as the pioneers had done). They went down with measuring-ropes and came up with numbers in their heads, which were mapped by Saturn: eight feet to the east of the privy-orifice, on the north side of the tunnel, was a drain-opening two hand-spans in breadth, which from time to time vomited cattle-guts. Eleven feet beyond that was the output shaft of a House of Office that must be in the back room of some other edifice. Two fathoms beyond that, on the right, a drain that must belong to the prison’s kitchen. Thirty sloshing paces beyond that, around a bend, a tiny in-flow of fresh water: the overflow drain of a pump and cistern that stood between the Prison kitchen and the dungeon. Up and down the tunnel these explorations spread, a picture filled in, one scrap at a time, by the accounts of the eager, reeking lads who emerged from the privy at all hours. Within a day they had found a stretch of rotten masonry wall, ninety to a hundred feet east of the privy, that could not be anything other than the outside wall of the dungeon itself. By listening with ears pressed against this, they convinced themselves that they heard chains rattling: the massive irons that the Warden of the Fleet had borrowed from Newgate Prison to bind the Shaftoe Gang. Now they went down with iron bars, chisels, and muffled hammers to peck and scrape away the crazed mortar that held that wall together. After two days of this, a chap on the other side—black, and so presumably Tomba—pulled a brick out of the way to make a fist-sized hole, and said that the miners must on no account remove any more material, lest their gaolers notice changes in the wall. So after that they moved on to other sorts of preparations. Several privy-shafts were ascended by boys recruited from London’s surplus of chimney-sweeps, hence, very much at home in filthy and cramped verticals. A particularly accommodating one was identified, and mapped to a house of prostitution in a corner of Bell Savage Inn: one of several culs-de-sac that lay just outside the prison wall, in the smoaky labyrinth of boozing-kens and spunging-houses between it and the Great Old Bailey.