“I seem rather out of it here,” he told himself patiently, and was glad to enter the wide portals of Lazarus’ Hotel.  A grand, swarthy Greek, magnificent in a scarlet jacket and gold braid, pulled open the door for him, and heard his mission smilingly.

“A brass-a image,” he repeated.  “Sir, you wait-a in the bar, an’ I tell-a the boy go look.”

“You must be quick, then,” said Dawson, “’cause I’m in a hurry to get back.”

“Yais,” smiled the Greek.  “Bimeby he rain-a bad.”

“Rain?” queried Dawson incredulously.  The air was like balm.

“You see,” the Greek nodded.  “This-a way, sir.  I go look-a quick.”

Dawson waited in the bar, where a dark, sallow bar-man stared him out of countenance for twenty minutes.  At the end of that time the image was forthcoming.  The ugly thing had burst the paper in which it was wrapped, and its grinning bullet-head projected handily.  The paper was wisped about its middle like a petticoat.  Dawson took it thankfully from the Greek, and made suitable remuneration in small silver.

“Bimeby rain,” repeated the Greek, as he opened a door for him again.

“Well, I’m not made of sugar,” replied Dawson, and set off.

It was night now, for in Mozambique evening is but a brief hiatus between darkness and day.  It lasts only while the sun is dipping; once the upper limb is under the horizon it is night, full and absolute.  As Dawson retraced his steps the sky over him was velvet-black, barely punctured by faint stars, and a breeze rustled faintly from the sea.  He had not gone two hundred yards when a large, warm drop of rain splashed on his back.  Another pattered on his hat, and it was raining, leisurely, ominously.

Dawson pulled up and took thought.  At the end of the main street he would have to turn to the left to the sea-front, and then to the left again to reach the landing-stage.  If, now, there were any nearer turning to the left—­if any of the dark alleys that opened continually beside him were passable—­he might get aboard the steamer to his dinner in the second-class saloon with a less emphatic drenching than if he went round by the way he had come.  Mozambique, he reflected, could not have only one street—­it was too big for that.  From the steamer, as it came to anchor, he had seen acre upon acre of flat roofs, and one of the gloomy alleys beside him must surely debouch upon the sea-front.  He elected to try one, anyhow, and accordingly turned aside into the next.

With ten paces he entered such a darkness as he had never known.  The alley was barely ten feet wide:  it lay like a crevasse between high, windowless walls of houses.  The warm, leisurely rain dropped perpendicularly upon him from an invisible sky, and presently, hugging the wall, he butted against a corner, and found, or guessed, that his way was no longer straight.  Underfoot there was mud and garbage that once gulfed him to the knee, and nowhere in all those terrible, silent walls on each side of him was there a light or a door, nor any sight of life near at hand.  He might have been in a catacomb, companioned by the dead.