tposts of civilization."

The subordinate shrugged his shoulders, and retorted:

"They would have told him on the coast."

"No doubt," said the commandant, giving the other a veiled look of
animosity, expressing thus a little of that loathing which had
gradually come to embrace everything habitual to this pitiless and
violently beautiful land. And when the subordinate had withdrawn, he
muttered to himself, as he returned to his apathetic contemplation of
the papers on his desk, "All the same, an ideal! And I killed it for
him a few days before there was any real need."

The moist heat of the equatorial summer penetrated the embrasures of
the fort, and made stifling even the dim, whitewashed room where
Lawrence Teck was sitting. Dusky from the sun, and seeming more
aquiline than ever in his gauntness, he remained like an effigy in the
suit of white duck that hung round him in loose folds, without so much
as a movement of his eyes. His hand rested on a tattered copy of an
English journal.

The commandant had extracted this journal from a pile of newspapers and
magazines of half a dozen countries, all thumbed and ragged from
perusals that had embraced the most trivial advertisements, and all
still precious because by their aid one's spirit could fly home. This
London journal contained at the bottom of a page, amid some gossip
about music in America, the announcement that "the widow of Lawrence
Teck, the explorer," had married the young composer, David Verne.

Raising his eyes at last toward the casement in the embrasure, Lawrence
Teck saw, against a glaring turquoise sky, the fronds of a borassus
palm, which seemed, like all the rest of nature, to be sleeping. He
leaped to his feet, realizing that he was in Africa, still far from the
coast, and that at this moment, in another hemisphere----

The walls, the sleeping borassus palm, the patch of sky, all became red.

He walked to and fro, saying to himself in what seemed a jocular tone:

"Didn't wait long. A composer. Think of that!"

He stood still, his bearded face upturned toward the casement. He let
out a peal of laughter that froze the blood of the white-robed servants
who had been dozing in the stone corridor. They crept beyond earshot
of the stranger who, with his hips wrapped in bark cloth, had suddenly
appeared on the rim of the safe world against a background of shields
painted with the devices of the terrible Mambava.

But Lawrence Teck quickl