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By Root 2751 0

black, dry, childlike or dwarfish mummy which was gripped by the neck. My breath burned like mustard, and that voice of inward communication which I had heard when I picked up the corpse tried to speak but it could not rise above a whisper. I suppose some people are more full of death than others. Evidently I happen to have a great death potential. Anyway, I begin to ask (or perhaps it was more a plea than a question), why is it always near me--why! Why can't I get away from it awhile! Why, why! "Well, what is this thing?" I said. This was the head of one of the lion-women--a sorceress. She had gone out and had trysts with lions. She had poisoned people and bewitched them. The Bunam's assistant had caught up with her, and she was tried by ordeal and strangled. But she had come back. These people made no bones about it. but said she was the very same lioness that Dahfu had captured. She was Atti. It was a positive identification. "Ame de lion," said Horko. "En bas." "I don't know how you can be so sure," I said. I could not take my eyes from the shriveled head with its finished, listless look. It spoke to me as that creature had done in Banyules at the aquarium after I had put Lily on the train. I thought as I had then, in the dim watery stony room, "This is it! The end!"

XVIII

That night Romilayu's praying was more fervent than ever. His lips stretched far forward and the muscles jumped under his skin while his moaning voice rose from the greatest depths. "That's right, Romilayu," I said, "pray. Pour it on. Pray like anything. Give it everything you've got. Come on, Romilayu, pray, I tell you." He didn't seem to me to be putting enough into it, and I flabbergasted him altogether by getting out of bed in the green silk drawers and kneeling beside him on the floor to join him in prayer. If you want to know something, it wasn't the first time in recent years by any means that I had addressed some words to God. Romilayu looked from under that cloud of poodle hair that hung over his low forehead, then sighed and shuddered, but whether with satisfaction at finding I had some religion in me or with terror at hearing my voice suddenly in his channel, or at the sight I made, I couldn't be expected to know. Oh, I got carried away! That withered head and the sight of poor Queen Yasra had got to my deepest feelings. And I prayed and prayed, "Oh, you � Something," I said, "you Something because of whom there is not Nothing. Help me to do Thy will. Take off my stupid sins. Untrammel me. Heavenly Father, open up my dumb heart and for Christ's sake preserve me from unreal things. Oh, Thou who tookest me from pigs, let me not be killed over lions. And forgive my crimes and nonsense and let me return to Lily and the kids." Then silent on my heavy knees and palm pressed to palm I went on praying while my weight bowed me nearly to the broad boards. I was shaken, you see, because I now understood clearly that I was caught between the king and the Bunam's faction. The king was set upon carrying out his experiment with me. He believed that it was never too late for any man to change, no matter how fully formed. And he took me for an instance, and was determined that I should absorb lion qualities from his lion. When I asked to see him in the morning after the visit of Yasra, the Bunam, and Horko, I was directed to his private pavilion. It was a garden laid out with some signs of formal design. At the four corners were dwarf orange trees. A flowering vine covered the palace wall like bougainvillaea, and here the king was sitting under one of his unfurled umbrellas. He wore his wide velvet hat with the fringe of human teeth and occupied a cushioned seat, surrounded by wives who kept drying his face with little squares of colored silk. They lit his pipe and handed him drinks, making sure that he was screened by a brocaded cloth whenever he took a sip. Beside one of the orange trees an old fellow was playing a stringed instrument. Very long, only a little shorter than a bass fiddle, rounded at the bottom, it stood on a thick peg and was played with