under the livid-green light of the censer, the leaden smoke issuing
from his lips, his eyes fixed unweariedly on a square piece of ebony
which rested on the coffin of the mummy near him. On this ebony he had
pasted side by side several woodcuts--snipped from the newspapers--of
the figures traced on the pieces of papyrus found in the mouths of the
dead. I could see, as time passed, that he was concentrating all his
powers on these figures; for the details of the deaths themselves were
all of a dreary sameness, offering few salient points for
investigation. In those cases where the suicide had left behind him
clear evidence of the means by which he had committed the act, there
was nothing to investigate; the others--rich and poor alike, peer and
peasant--trooped out by thousands on the far journey, without leaving
the faintest footprint to mark the road by which they had gone.

This was perhaps the reason that, after a time, Zaleski discarded the
newspapers, leaving their perusal to me, and turned his attention
exclusively to the ebon tablet. Knowing as I full well did the daring
and success of his past spiritual adventures,--the subtlety, the
imagination, the imperial grip of his intellect,--I did not at all
doubt that his choice was wise, and would in the end be justified.
These woodcuts--now so notorious--were all exactly similar in design,
though minutely differing here and there in drawing. The following is a
facsimile of one of them taken by me at random:

[Illustration]

The time passed. It now began to be a grief to me to see the turgid
pallor that gradually overspread the always ashen countenance of
Zaleski; I grew to consider the ravaging life that glared and blazed in
his sunken eye as too volcanic, demonic, to be canny: the mystery, I