The door opened... the dumb man came in with a number of books, a box of cigarettes, and other small comforts.
There was no clock in the room and my wrist-watch had been removed....
I saw no one but this silent Asiatic all day, of the progress of which I could judge only by the appearance of regular meals.
Several times, but more faintly than on the first occasion, I could have sworn I heard river noises, and once what strangely resem- bled a motor horn.
The Chinese surgeon attended me after I had dealt with a dinner excellently prepared, and "groomed" me for the night. When he had gone, I lay smoking a final cigarette and wondering if....
"Turn out the light when you are tired," had been his final injunction.
6
Lying there in silence and darkness. I almost touched rock bottom. Despair drew desperately near. I was utterly at the mercy of this woman. Whatever had happened to me had left me weaker than a child. And that damnable mystery, the true nature of my illness, was not the least of my troubles.
I suffered no physical pain, except for a throbbing head; I could recall no blow... what had been done to me?
Sleep was out of the question; but I had tried to find relief from the inexorable amber light. Why, I wondered wearily, had I imagined riverside and street sounds and now imagined them no longer?
And, whilst I turned this problem over in my mind, came a sound which was not imagi- nary.
It was muffled. But I had learned that all sounds reached the green and gold room in that way. Nevertheless, dim though it was, I knew it... an eerie minor cry--the cry I had heard in Petrie's courtyard in Cairo....
The call of a dacoit!
Good God! Had this she-fiend been mocking me? Was I to be strangled as I lay there helpless?
My hand reached out for the switch. I was trembling wildly. Weakness had destroyed my nerve. I grasped it--a pendant--pressed the button....
No light came! At which I nearly lost myself. I suppose for the first time in my life, I was delirious, or hysterical.
"Smith!" I cried. "Weymouth! Help!..."
My voice was a husky whisper. Weakness and terror had imposed on me that crowning torture of nightmare--inability to summon aid in an emergency.
But this was the peak of my sudden, childish frenzy. The fit passed. Nothing further happened. And I grew cool enough to realise that perhaps my enforced silence had been a blessing in disguise. Smith! Weymouth!... Heaven only knew where my poor friends were at that hour.
The door behind my couch opened.
I lay still--resigned, now, to the inevitable. I did not even attempt to look around, but stayed with half-closed eyes prepared for death.
A dim light appeared.
Watching, I lost faith in myself. I was altogether too exhausted, in my low state, to experience further fear; but I determined that my brain was not so completely to be relied upon as I had supposed. Actually, I was not awake; I hovered between two states in a borderland of hideous fancy.
An outre figure carrying a lantern came into the room. The light of the lantern cast a huge, misshapen image of its bearer on the golden wall.
This was a hunchbacked dwarf--epicene, revolting. His head was of more than normal size; his grey-black bloated features were a parody of humanity; his eyes bulged, demoniac, from a vast skull. He wore indoor Arab dress, a huge tar-bush crowning his repulsive ugliness.
Never so much as glancing in my direc- tion, he crossed to the door on the other side of the room and went out.
Both doors remained open. Sounds reached me.
First among these I detected voices-- subdued but keyed to excitement.
They were voices of delirium, I decided. They spoke a language which conveyed nothing to me.
A man wearing an ill-fitting serge suit and a dark blue turban raced through the room in the wake of the dwarf. He carried an electric torch. Its reflection, diffused from the golden walls, exhibited a yellow, tigerish face, lips curled back and fanglike teeth bared in a sadistic grin....
The dacoit who had followed me to Cairo! It was a procession of images created by a disordered brain. Yet I was unconscious of any other symptoms of fever.
Two kinds of sounds came to me now: the excited voices, growing louder, and a more distant, continuous disturbance difficult to identify. Then came a third.
A pulsing shriek quivered through the house... and died into wordless gurgling.
The dacoit reappeared. He carried a short, curved knife, its blade red to the hilt.... His squinting bloodshot eyes fixed themselves upon me. He drew nearer and nearer to the divan upon which I lay helpless.
Out of the babel of voices, one voice detached itself; a harsh, metallic voice. It cried three words.
The dacoit passed me--and returned by the way he had originally entered.
A sustained, harsh note... a flat, surely unmistakable note--that of a police whistle!
I smiled in the darkness.
Clearly, high fever had claimed me. But this ghastly delirium must soon end in uncon- sciousness. I touched my forehead. It was wet, but cold.
The indistinguishable voices grew faint-- and died away.
But that queer, remote booming continued.
And now I determined that it came not from the door behind me--that by which the dacoit had gone out--but from that which faced the foot of the divan... the door through which the hunchback had fled.
A dim crash sent ghostly echo messengers through the building.
Shouts followed. But now I could pick out certain words....
"Easy at the landing sir! Wait for me..."
A sound of clattering footsteps, apparently on a staircase....
"You take that door! I'll take this!"
Surely I knew that great, deep voice.
More ghostly crashing.
"Nothing here! "
"Next floor!"
A background of excited conversation; then:
"Nayland Smith!" came the great voice --"are you there, sir? Shan Greville! Are you there?"
I did know that voice!
"Silence!" it commanded. "Listen!"
In the interval of stillness which followed, I tried to reply. My heart was beating like a racing engine. My brain had become a circus. And the answering cry died in my throat.
"Carry on!"
Clattering of footsteps was renewed. They were somewhere outside the green-gold room, when:
"God's mercy!"
They had found the hunchback. Sudden silence fell.
Subdued voices broke it, until, above them:
There's another room!" came a cry.
Holding an electric lamp, the speaker burst through the doorway....
Delirium was ended: this was reality! "Greville! "
"Weymouth!" I said faintly and stretched out a shaking hand.
Chapter Eighth
SWAZI PASHA ARRIVES
Perhaps the presence of blue-uniformed and helmeted constables in a measure prepared me. But, looking back, I realized that this anomalous intrusion upon the oasis did not register a hundred per cent of its true force at the time.
I was weak in a degree which I simply couldn't believe or accept. The idea of mirage remained. When they carried me through a queer room adjoining that in which I had suffered--a room where something lay covered by a piece of ornate tapestry torn from the wall--I was still no more than half alive to facts.
That the house of the Sheikh Ismail had been raided in the nick of time was clear enough. What had become of Petrie I failed to imagine, nor could I account for the presence of London policemen. Also, I was dreadfully concerned about Nayland Smith.