Monsieur, look me in the eyes a little and listen. I
request of you that holding that black, engraved stone in your hand,
you will be so good as to throw your soul, do you understand, your
soul, back, back, _back_ and tell us where it come from, who have it,
what part it play in their life, and everything about it."

"How am I to know?" asked Godfrey, with indignation.

Then suddenly everything before him faded, and he saw himself standing
in a desert by a lump of black rock, at which a brown man clad only in
a waist cloth and a kind of peaked straw hat, was striking with an
instrument that seemed to be half chisel and half hammer, fashioned
apparently from bronze, or perhaps of greenish-coloured flint.
Presently the brown man, who had a squint in one eye and a hurt toe
that was bound round with something, picked up a piece of the black
rock that he had knocked off, and surveyed it with evident
satisfaction. Then the scene vanished.

Godfrey told it with interest to the audience who were apparently also
interested.

"The finding of the stone," said Madame. "Continue, young Monsieur."

Another vision rose before Godfrey's mind. He beheld a low room having
a kind of verandah, roofed with reeds, and beyond it a little courtyard
enclosed by a wall of grey-coloured mud bricks, out of some of which
stuck pieces of straw. This courtyard opened onto a narrow street where
many oddly-clothed people walked up and down, some of whom wore peaked
caps. A little man, old and grey, sat with the fragment of black rock
on a low table before him, which Godfrey knew to be the same stone that
he had already seen. By him lay graving tools, and he was engaged in
polishing the stone, now covered with figures and writing, by help of a
stick, a piece of rough cloth and oil. A young man with a curly beard
walked into the little courtyard, and to him the old fellow delivered
the engraved stone with obeisances, receiving payment in some curious
currency.

Then followed picture upon picture in all of which the talisman
appeared in the hands of sundry of its owners. Some of these pictures
had to do with love, some with religious ceremonies, and some with war.
One, too, with its sale, perhaps in a time of siege or scarcity, for a
small loaf of black-looking bread, by an aged woman who wept at parting
with it.

After this he saw an Arab-looking man finding the stone amongst the
crumbling remains of a brick wall that showed signs of having been