Heywood stamped angrily, without effect.  Wutzler stood abject, a magician impotent against his swarm of familiars.  Gradually the rats, silent and leaping, passed away into the darkness, as though they heard the summons of a Pied Piper.

“It doesn’t attack Europeans.”  Heywood still used that curious inflection.

“Then my brother Julien is still alive,” retorted Doctor Chantel, bitterly.

“What do you think, Gilly?” persisted Heywood.

His compatriot nodded in a meaningless way.

“The doctor’s right, of course,” he answered.  “I wish my wife weren’t coming back.”

“Dey are a remember,” ventured Wutzler, timidly.  “A warnung.”

The others, as though it had been a point of custom, ignored him.  All stared down, musing, at the vacant stones.

“Then the concert’s off to-morrow night,” mocked Heywood, with an unpleasant laugh.

“On the contrary.”  Gilly caught him up, prompt and decided.  “We shall need all possible amusements; also to meet and plan our campaign.  Meantime,—­what do you say, Doctor?—­chloride of lime in pots?”

“That, evidently,” smiled the handsome man.  “Yes, and charcoal burnt in braziers, perhaps, as Pere Fenouil advises.  Fumigate.”—­Satirical and debonair, he shrugged his shoulders.—­“What use, among these thousands of yellow pigs?”

“I wish she weren’t coming,” repeated Gilly.

Rudolph, left outside this conference, could bear the uncertainty no longer.

“I am a new arrival,” he confided to his young host.  “I do not understand.  What is it?”

“The plague, old chap,” replied Heywood, curtly.  “These playful little animals get first notice.  You’re not the only arrival to-night.”

CHAPTER III

UNDER FIRE

The desert was sometimes Gobi, sometimes Sahara, but always an infinite stretch of sand that floated up and up in a stifling layer, like the tide.  Rudolph, desperately choked, continued leaping upward against an insufferable power of gravity, or straining to run against the force of paralysis.  The desert rang with phantom voices,—­Chinese voices that mocked him, chanting of pestilence, intoning abhorrently in French.

He woke to find a knot of bed-clothes smothering him.  To his first unspeakable relief succeeded the astonishment of hearing the voices continue in shrill chorus, the tones Chinese, the words, in louder fragments, unmistakably French.  They sounded close at hand, discordant matins sung by a mob of angry children.  Once or twice a weary, fretful voice scolded feebly:  “Un-peu-de-s’lence!  Un-peu-de-s’lence!” Rudolph rose to peep through the heavy jalousies, but saw nothing more than sullen daylight, a flood of vertical rain, and thin rivulets coursing down a tiled roof below.  The morning was dismally cold.