“Will you bite the clouds?” asked the second guard, in a soft and husky bass.  As he spoke, the great nose trembled slightly.

“No, I will bite ginger,” replied the white man.

“Why is your face so green?”

“It is a melon-face—­a green face with a red heart.”

“Pass,” said the cripple, gently.  He pulled a cord—­the nose quaking with this exertion—­and opened the third door.

Again the chamber was dim.  A venerable man in gleaming silks—­a grandfather, by his drooping rat-tail moustaches—­sat fanning himself.  In the breath of his black fan, the lamplight tossed queer shadows leaping, and danced on the table of polished camagon.  Except for this unrest, the aged face might have been carved from yellow soapstone.  But his slant eyes were the sharpest yet.

“You have come far,” he said, with sinister and warning courtesy.

Too far, thought Heywood, in a sinking heart; but answered:—­

“From the East, where the Fusang cocks spit orient pearls.”

“And where did you study?” The black fan stopped fluttering.

“In the Red Flower Pavilion.”

“What book did you read?”

“The book,” said Heywood, holding his wits by his will, “the book was Ten Thousand Thousand Pages.”

“And the theme?”

“The waters of the deluge crosswise flow.”  “And what”—­the aged voice rose briskly—­“what saw you on the waters?”

“The Eight Abbots, floating,” answered Heywood, negligently.—­“But,” ran his thought, “he’ll pump me dry.”

“Why,” continued the examiner, “do you look so happy?”

“Because Heaven has sent the Unicorn.”

The black fan began fluttering once more.  It seemed a hopeful sign; but the keen old eyes were far from satisfied.

“Why have you such a sensual face?”

“I was born under a peach tree.”

“Pass,” said the old man, regretfully.  And Heywood, glancing back from the mouth of a dark corridor, saw him, beside the table of camagon, wagging his head like a judge doubtful of his judgment.

The narrow passage, hot, fetid, and blacker than the wholesome night without, crooked about sharp corners, that bruised the wanderer’s hands and arms.  Suddenly he fell down a short flight of slimy steps, landing in noisome mud at the bottom of some crypt.  A trap, a suffocating well, he thought; and rose filthy, choked with bitterness and disgust.  Only the taunting justice of Wutzler’s argument, the retort ad hominem, had sent him headlong into this dangerous folly.  He had scolded a coward with hasty words, and been forced to follow where they led.  To this loathsome hole.  Behind him, a door closed, a bar scraped softly into place.  Before him, as he groped in rage and self-reproach, rose a vault of solid plaster, narrow as a chimney.

But presently, glancing upward, he saw a small cluster of stars blinking, voluptuous, immeasurably overhead.  Their pittance of light, as his eyesight cleared, showed a ladder rising flat against the wall.  He reached up, grasped the bamboo rungs, hoisted with an acrobatic wrench, and began to climb cautiously.