pulsating with a distant
drumbeat like the tramp of an army of devils. The colors were angry and
glowering now. The shapes they took as they plaited and wove themselves
into one another were all involuted, everything turning itself inside
out, and the end of every separate movement was blood-red.

King groaned aloud and rolled over on his side, just as the stuff became
so dim and dreadful that you could hardly see your hand before your
face, and a noise like the rushing of the wind between the worlds made
every inch of your skin prickly with goose-flesh. Low though the colors
were, when you shut your eyes you could still see them, but I could not
see the Gray Mahatma, and I was sure he could not see me. He would not
know which of us was down and out.

So I seized King and dragged him across the floor to the point where the
irregular stone steps provided the only way of escape. There I hove him
like a sack on to my shoulders. In that drunken, throbbing twilight it
would have been easy for some of the gray-beard's crew to lean from the
ledge and send me reeling back again; the best chance was to climb
quickly before they were aware of me.

When I reached the ledge it was deserted. There was nothing whatever to
indicate where the gray-beard and his crew were. I could not remember
exactly the direction of the entrance, but made for the wall, intending
to feel my way along it; and just as I started to do that I heard the
Gray Mahatma climbing up behind me.

He made hardly more noise than a cat. But though the Mahatma was
stealthy, he came swiftly, and in a moment I felt his hand touch me.
That was exactly at the moment when the music and colors were subdued to
a sort of hell-brew twilight--the kind of glow you might expect before
the overwhelming of the world.

"You are as strong as the buffalo himself," he said, mistaking me for
King. "Leave that fool here, and come with me."

My right hand was free, but the Gray Mahatma had plenty of assistance at
his beck and call.

So I put my hand in the small of his back and shoved him along in front
of me. If he should learn too soon that King, and not I, was down and
out he might decide to have done with us both there and then. My task
was to get out of that cavern before the golden light came on again.

The Gray Mahatma led the way to the door, and it was just as well that
he did, for there was some secret way of opening it that I should almost
certainly have failed to find