its walls—­and at the same time so huge and grandiose—­there were walls thirty feet thick, galleries with scores of rust-eaten cannon, circular dining-halls, king’s apartments and queen’s apartments, towering battlements and great arched doorways—­ that it seemed to Benham to embody the power and passing of that miracle of human history, tyranny, the helpless bowing of multitudes before one man and the transitoriness of such glories, more completely than anything he had ever seen or imagined in the world before.  Beneath the battlements—­they are choked above with jungle grass and tamarinds and many flowery weeds—­the precipice fell away a sheer two thousand feet, and below spread a vast rich green plain populous and diversified, bounded at last by the blue sea, like an amethystine wall.  Over this precipice Christophe was wont to fling his victims, and below this terrace were bottle-shaped dungeons where men, broken and torn, thrust in at the neck-like hole above, starved and died:  it was his headquarters here, here he had his torture chambers and the means for nameless cruelties. . . .

“Not a hundred years ago,” said Benham’s companion, and told the story of the disgraced favourite, the youth who had offended.

“Leap,” said his master, and the poor hypnotized wretch, after one questioning glance at the conceivable alternatives, made his last gesture of servility, and then stood out against the sky, swayed, and with a convulsion of resolve, leapt and shot headlong down through the shimmering air.

Came presently the little faint sound of his fall.

The Emperor satisfied turned away, unmindful of the fact that this projectile he had launched had caught among the bushes below, and presently struggled and found itself still a living man.  It could scramble down to the road and, what is more wonderful, hope for mercy.  An hour and it stood before Christophe again, with an arm broken and bloody and a face torn, a battered thing now but with a faint flavour of pride in its bearing.  “Your bidding has been done, Sire,” it said.

“So,” said the Emperor, unappeased.  “And you live?  Well—­ Leap again. . . .”

And then came other stories.  The young man told them as he had heard them, stories of ferocious wholesale butcheries, of men standing along the walls of the banqueting chamber to be shot one by one as the feast went on, of exquisite and terrifying cruelties, and his one note of wonder, his refrain was, “Here!  Not a hundred years ago. . . .  It makes one almost believe that somewhere things of this sort are being done now.”

They ate their lunch together amidst the weedy flowery ruins.  The lizards which had fled their coming crept out again to bask in the sunshine.  The soldier-guide and guard scrabbled about with his black fingers in the ruinous and rifled tomb of Christophe in a search for some saleable memento. . . .