le answer.

In a anguish of fearful anticipation I listened for the cry and the
dull thud which should proclaim the fate of my intrepid friend; but
no such sounds came to me. Some thirty seconds passed in this fashion,
when a subdued call from above caused me to start and look aloft.

Nayland Smith was peering down from the railing on the roof.

"Mind your head!" he warned--and over the rail swung the end of a
light wooden ladder, lowering it until it rested upon the crest
astride of which I sat.

"Up you come!--then Weymouth!"

Whilst Smith held the top firmly, I climbed up rung by rung, not
daring to think of what lay below.

My relief when at last I grasped the railing, climbed over, and found
myself upon a wooden platform, was truly inexpressible.

"Come on, Weymouth!" rapped Nayland Smith. "This ladder has to be
lowered back down the trap before another visitor arrives!"

Taking short, staccato breaths at every step, Inspector Weymouth
ascended, ungainly, that frail and moving stair. Arrived beside me,
he wiped the perspiration from his face and forehead.

"I wouldn't do it again for a hundred pounds!" he said hoarsely.

"You don't have to!" snapped Smith.

Back he hauled the ladder, shouldered it, and stepping to a square
opening in one corner of the rickety platform, lowered it cautiously
down.

"Have you a knife with a corkscrew in it?" he demanded.

Weymouth had one, which he produced. Nayland Smith screwed it into
the weather-worn frame, and by that means reclosed the trapdoor
softly, then--

"Look," he said, "there is the house of hashish!"

CHAPTER XXVI

"THE DEMON'S SELF"

Through the glass panes of the skylight I looked down upon a scene so
bizarre that my actual environment became blotted out, and I was
mentally translated to Cairo--to that quarter of Cairo immediately
surrounding the famous Square of the Fountain--to those indescribable
streets, wherefrom arises the perfume of deathless evil, wherein, to
the wailing, luresome music of the reed pipe, painted dancing-girls
sway in the wild abandon of dances that were ancient when Thebes was
the City of a Hundred Gates; I seemed to stand again in el Wasr.

The room below was rectangular, and around three of the walls were
divans strewn with garish cushions, whilst highly colored Eastern rugs
were spread about the floor. Four lamps swung on chains, two from
either of the beams which traversed the apartment. They were fine
exampl