‘Did not know where to look,’ said Bude.

‘But you do?’ asked Merton.

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘Then why don’t you bring one over to the Zoo?’

‘I may some day.’

‘Are there any more survivors of extinct species?’

’Merton, is this an interview?  Are you doing Mr. Jones Harvey at home for a picture paper?’

‘No, I’ve dropped the Press,’ said Merton, ’I ask in a spirit of scientific curiosity.’

’Well, there is the Dinornis, the Moa of New Zealand.  A bird as big as the Roc in the “Arabian Nights."’

‘Have you seen him?’

’No, but I have seen her, the hen bird.  She was sitting on eggs.  No man knows her nest but myself, and old Te-iki-pa, the chief medicine-man, or Tohunga, of the Maori King.  The Moa’s eyrie is in the King’s country.  It is a difficult country, and a dangerous business, if the cock Moa chances to come home.’

‘Bude, is this worthy of an old friend, this blague?’

‘Do you doubt my word?’

‘If you give me your word I must believe—­that you dreamed it.’

Then a strange thing happened.

Bude walked to a small case of instruments that stood on a table in the smoking-room.  He unlocked it, took out a lancet, brought a Rhodian bowl from a shelf, and bared his arm.

‘Do you want proof?’

‘Proof that you saw a hen Moa sitting?’ asked Merton in amazement.

’Not exactly, but proof that Te-iki-pa knew a thing or two, quite as out of the way as the habitat of the Moa.’

‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Bare your arm, and hold it over the bowl.’

The room was full of the yellow dusky light of an early summer morning in London.  Outside the heavy carts were rolling by:  in full civilisation the scene was strange.

‘The Blood Covenant?’ asked Merton.

Bude nodded.

Merton turned up his cuff, Bude let a little blood drop into the bowl, then performed the same operation on his own arm.

‘This is all rot,’ he said, ’but without this I cannot show you, by virtue of my oath to Te-iki-pa, what I mean to show you.  Now repeat after me what I am going to say.’

He spoke a string of words, among which Merton, as he repeated them, could only recognise mana and atua.  The vowel sounds were as in Italian.

’Now these words you must never report to any one, without my permission.’

‘Not likely,’ said Merton, ’I only remember two of them, and these I knew before.’

‘All right,’ said Bude.

He then veiled his face in a piece of silk that lay on a sofa, and rapidly, in a low voice, chanted a kind of hymn in a tongue unknown to Merton.  All this he did with a bored air, as if he thought the performance a superfluous mummery.

’Now what shall I show you?  Something simple.  Look at the bookcase, and think of any book you may want to consult.’