“The Stanleighs—­quite so,” he nodded agreement, and fixed me with a maudlin stare.  Something prompted me to fill his glass again.  He drank it off mechanically.  Again I poured, and he obediently drank.  With an effort he tried to pick up the thread of our conversation: 

“What did you say?  Oh, the Stanleighs ... yes, yes, of course.”  He slowly nodded his head and fell silent.  “I was about to say ...”  He broke off again and seemed to ruminate profoundly....  “Love-birds—­” I caught the word feebly from his lips, spoken as if in a daze.  The glass hung dripping in his relaxed grasp.

It was a crucial moment in which his purpose seemed to waver and die in his clouded brain.  A great hope sprang up in my heart, which was hammering furiously.  If I could divert his fuddled thoughts and get him back to shore while the wine lulled him to forgetfulness.

I leaned forward to take the glass which was all but slipping from his hand, when Lakalatcha flamed with redoubled fury.  It was as if the mountain had suddenly bared its fiery heart to the heavens, and a muffled detonation reached my ears.

Farquharson straightened up with a jerk and scanned the smoking peak, from which a new trickle of white-hot lava had broken forth in a threadlike waterfall.  He watched its graceful play as if hypnotized, and began babbling to himself in an incoherent prattle.  All his faculties seemed suddenly awake, but riveted solely upon the heavy labouring of the mountain.  He was chiding it in Malay as if it were a fractious child.  When I ventured to urge him back to shore he made no protest, but followed me into the boat.  As I pushed off and took up the oars he had eyes for nothing but the flaming cone, as if its leaping fires held for him an Apocalyptic vision.

I strained at the oars as if in a race, with all eternity at stake, blindly urging the boat ahead through water that flashed crimson at every stroke.  The mountain now flamed like a beacon, and I rowed for dear life over a sea of blood.

Farquharson sat entranced before the spectacle, chanting to himself a kind of insane ritual, like a Parsee fire-worshipper making obeisance before his god.  He was rapt away to some plane of mystic exaltation, to some hinterland of the soul that merged upon madness.  When at length the boat crunched upon the sandy shore he got up unsteadily from the stern and pointed to the pharos that flamed in the heavens.

“The fire upon the altar is lit,” he addressed me, oracularly, while the fanatic light of a devotee burned in his eyes.  “Shall we ascend and prepare the sacrifice?”

I leaned over the oars, panting from my exertions, indifferent to his rhapsody.

“If you’ll take my advice, you’ll get back at once to your bungalow and strip off that wet sleeping-suit,” I bluntly counseled him, but I might as well have argued with a man in a trance.

He leaped over the gunwale and strode up the beach.  Again he struck his priest-like attitude and invoked me to follow.