The stillness and the loneliness scared and disturbed him.  He turned on a sudden impulse to make his way back to the lights of the street.

But this was to reckon without the map of Mozambique—­which does not exist.  Ten minutes sufficed to overwhelm him in an intricacy of blind ways.  He groped by a wall to a turning, fared cautiously to pass it, found a blank wall opposite him, and was lost.  His sense of direction left him, and he had no longer any idea of where the street lay and where the sea.  He floundered in gross darkness, inept and persistent.  It took some time, many turnings, and a tumble in the mud to convince him that he was lost.  And then the rain came down in earnest.

It roared, it pelted, it stamped on him.  It was not rain, as he knew it:  it was a cascade, a vehement and malignant assault by all the wetness in heaven.  It whipped, it stung, it thrashed; he was drenched in a moment as though by a trick.  He could see nothing, but groped blind and frightened under it, feeling along the wall with one hand, still carrying the bronze image by the head with the other.  Once he dropped it, and would have left it, but with an impulse like an effort of self-respect, he searched for it, groping elbow-deep in the slush and water, found it, and stumbled on.  Another corner presented itself; he came round it, and almost at once a light showed itself.

It was a slit of brightness below a door, and without a question the drenched and bewildered Dawson lifted the image and hammered on the door with it.  A hum of voices within abated as he knocked, and there was silence.  He hammered again, and he heard bolts being withdrawn inside.  The door opened slowly, and a man looked out.

“I’ve lost my way,” flustered Dawson pitifully.  “I’m wet through, and I don’t know where I am.”  Even as he spoke the rain was cutting through his clothes like blades.  “Please let me in;” he concluded.  “Please let me in.”

The man was backed by the light, and Dawson could see nothing of him save that he was tall and stoutly made.  But he laughed, and opened the door a foot farther to let him pass in.

“Come in,” he bade him.  His voice was foreign and high.  “Come in.  All may come in to-night.”

Dawson entered, leading a trail of water over a floor of bare boards.  His face was running wet, and he was newly dazzled with the light.  But when he had wiped his eyes, he drew a deep breath of relief and looked about him.  The room was unfurnished save for a littered table and some chairs, and a gaudy picture of the Virgin that hung on the wall.  On each side of it was a sconce, in which a slovenly candle guttered.  A woman was perched on a corner of the table, a heavy shawl over her head.  Under it the dark face, propped in the fork of her hand, glowed sullenly, and her bare, white arm was like a menacing thing.  Dawson bowed to her with an instinct of politeness.  In a chair near her a grossly fat man was huddled, scowling heavily under thick, fair brows, while the other man, he who had opened the door, stood smiling.