sioner Nayland Smith, who enjoys the
confidence of the India Office, and who is empowered to control the
movements of the Criminal Investigation Department, learns nothing
from experience. He is less than a child, since he has twice rashly
precipitated himself into a chamber charged with an anesthetic prepared,
by a process of my own, from the lycoperdon or Common Puff-ball."

I became fully master of my senses, and I became fully alive to a
stupendous fact. At last it was ended; we were utterly in the power of
Dr. Fu-Manchu; our race was run.

I sat in a low vaulted room. The roof was of ancient brickwork, but the
walls were draped with exquisite Chinese fabric having a green ground
whereon was a design representing a grotesque procession of white
peacocks. A green carpet covered the floor, and the whole of the
furniture was of the same material as the chair to which I was strapped,
viz:--ebony inlaid with ivory. This furniture was scanty. There was a
heavy table in one corner of the dungeonesque place, on which were a
number of books and papers. Before this table was a high-backed, heavily
carven chair. A smaller table stood upon the right of the only visible
opening, a low door partially draped with bead work curtains, above
which hung a silver lamp. On this smaller table, a stick of incense, in
a silver holder, sent up a pencil of vapor into the air, and the
chamber was loaded with the sickly sweet fumes. A faint haze from the
incense-stick hovered up under the roof.

In the high-backed chair sat Dr. Fu-Manchu, wearing a green robe upon
which was embroidered a design, the subject of which at first glance
was not perceptible, but which presently I made out to be a huge white
peacock. He wore a little cap perched upon the dome of his amazing
skull, and with one clawish hand resting upon the ebony of the table, he
sat slightly turned toward me, his emotionless face a mask of incredible
evil. In spite of, or because of, the high intellect written upon it,
the face of Dr. Fu-Manchu was more utterly repellent than any I have
ever known, and the green eyes, eyes green as those of a cat in the
darkness, which sometimes burned like witch lamps, and sometimes were
horribly filmed like nothing human or imaginable, might have mirrored
not a soul, but an emanation of hell, incarnate in this gaunt,
high-shouldered body.

Stretched flat upon the floor lay Nayland Smith, partially stripped, his
arms thrown back over his head an