HE.

Next day Leonora was suffering from a slight feverish cold, and I don’t wonder at it considering what we suffered in the Zu.  I therefore went alone to the rendezvous where I was to meet ‘our representative.’

To my surprise, nobody was there but old Pellmelli himself.

‘Why, you said you would send your representative!’ I exclaimed.

‘We are our usual representative,’ he answered rather sulkily.  ’Come on, for we have to call on Messrs. Apples, the famous advertisers.’

‘Why?’ said I.

‘Can you ask?’ he replied.  ’Can aught be more interesting than an advertiser?’

‘I call it log rolling,’ I answered; but he was silent.

He went at a great pace, and presently, in a somewhat sordid street, pointed his finger silently to an object over a door.

It was the carven head of an Ethiopian!

This new confirmation of the prophecy gave me quite a turn, especially when I read the characters inscribed beneath ­

TRY OUR FINE NEGRO’S HEAD!

‘Here dwells the sorcerer, even Asher,’ said Pellmelli, and began to crawl upstairs on his hands and knees.

‘Why do you do that?’ I asked, determined, if I must follow Pellmelli, at all events not to follow his example.

’It is the manner of the tribe of Interviewers, my daughter.  Ours is a blessed task, yet must we feign humility, or the savage people kick us and drive us forth with our garments rent.’

He now humbly tapped at a door, and a strange voice cried,

‘Entrez!’

Pellmelli (whose Russian is his strong point) paused in doubt, but I explained that the word was French for ‘come in.’

He crawled in on his stomach, while I followed him erect, and we found ourselves before a strange kind of tent.  It had four posts, and a broidered veil was drawn all round it.

Within the veil the sorcerer was concealed, and he asked in a gruff tone,

‘Wadyerwant?’

Pellmelli explained that he had come to receive a brief personal statement for the Budget.

The Voice replied, without hesitation, ’The Centuries and the AEons pass, and I too make the pass. Je saute la coupe,’ he added, in a foreign tongue.  ’While thy race wore naught but a little blue paint, I dwelt among the forgotten peoples.  The Red Sea knows me, and the Nile has turned scarlet at my words.  I am Khoot Hoomi, I am also the Chela of the Mountain!’

’Now it is my turn to ask you a few easy questions.

’Who sitteth on the throne of Hokey, Pokey, Winky Wum, the Monarch of the Anthropophagi?

’Have the Jews yet come to their land, or have the owners of the land gone to the Jews?

’Doth Darius the Mede yet rule, or hath his kingdom passed to the Bassarids?’

As Pellmelli was utterly floored by these inquiries (which indicated that the sorcerer had been for a considerable time out of the range of the daily papers), I answered them as well as I could.

When his very natural curiosity had been satisfied by a course of Mangnall’s Questions, I ventured to broach my own business.

He said he did not deal in mummies himself, though he had a stuffed crocodile very much at my service; but would I call to-morrow, and bring Leonora?  He added that he had known of our coming by virtue of his secret art of divination.  ‘And thyself,’ he added, ’shalt gaze without extra charge in the Fountain of Knowledge.’

Thrusting a withered yellow hand out of the mystic tent, he pointed to a table where stood a small circular dish or cup of white earthenware, containing some brown milky liquid.

‘Gaze therein!’ said the sorcerer.

I gazed ­There was a Stranger in the tea!

Deeply impressed with the belief (laugh at it if you will) that I was in the presence of a being of more than mortal endowments, I was withdrawing, when my glance fell on his weird familiars, ­two tailless cats.  This prodigy made me shudder, and I said, in tones of the deepest awe and sympathy, ‘Poor puss!’

‘Yes,’ came the strange voice from within the tent, ’they are born without tails.  I bred them so; it hath taken many centuries and much trouble, but at last I have triumphed.  Once, too, I reared a breed of dogs with two tails, but after a while they became a proverb for pride; Nature loathed them, and they perished. [Greek:  Chaire!] Vale!’

This, though not understood, of course, by Pellmelli, was as good as an invitation to withdraw, so I induced the old man to come away, promising the magician I would return on the morrow.

Who was this awful man, to whom centuries were as moments, whose very correspondence, as I had noticed, came through the Dead Letter Office, and who spoke in the tongues of the dead past?