He raced up the path, past Inspector Weymouth, who stood swaying there like a drunken man.  I was close upon his heels.  Behind me came the police.

The door was impassable!  Already, it vomited a deathly heat, borne upon stifling fumes like those of the mouth of the Pit.  We burst a window.  The room within was a furnace!

“My God!” cried someone.  “This is supernatural!”

“Listen!” cried another.  “Listen!”

The crowd which a fire can conjure up at any hour of day or night, out of the void of nowhere, was gathering already.  But upon all descended a pall of silence.

From the heat of the holocaust a voice proclaimed itself—­a voice raised, not in anguish but in triumph!  It chanted barbarically—­and was still.

The abnormal flames rose higher—­leaping forth from every window.

“The alarm!” said Smith hoarsely.  “Call up the brigade!”

I come to the close of my chronicle, and feel that I betray a trust—­ the trust of my reader.  For having limned in the colors at my command the fiendish Chinese doctor, I am unable to conclude my task as I should desire, unable, with any consciousness of finality, to write Finis to the end of my narrative.

It seems to me sometimes that my pen is but temporarily idle—­that I have but dealt with a single phase of a movement having a hundred phases.  One sequel I hope for, and against all the promptings of logic and Western bias.  If my hope shall be realized I cannot, at this time, pretend to state.

The future, ’mid its many secrets, holds this precious one from me.

I ask you then, to absolve me from the charge of ill completing my work; for any curiosity with which this narrative may leave the reader burdened is shared by the writer.

With intent, I have rushed you from the chambers of Professor Jenner Monde to that closing episode at the deserted cottage; I have made the pace hot in order to impart to these last pages of my account something of the breathless scurry which characterized those happenings.

My canvas may seem sketchy:  it is my impression of the reality.  No hard details remain in my mind of the dealings of that night.  Fu-Manchu arrested—­Fu-Manchu, manacled, entering the cottage on his mission of healing; Weymouth, miraculously rendered sane, coming forth; the place in flames.

And then?

To a shell the cottage burned, with an incredible rapidity which pointed to some hidden agency; to a shell about ashes which held no trace of human bones!

It has been asked of me:  Was there no possibility of
Fu-Manchu’s having eluded us in the ensuing confusion? 
Was there no loophole of escape?

I reply, that so far as I was able to judge, a rat could scarce have quitted the building undetected.  Yet that Fu-Manchu had, in some incomprehensible manner and by some mysterious agency, produced those abnormal flames, I cannot doubt.  Did he voluntarily ignite his own funeral pyre?