Into those uncanny eyes I stared, those eyes, long, narrow, and slightly oblique, their brilliant, catlike greenness sometimes horribly filmed, like the eyes of some grotesque bird....

Thus it began; and from this point I was carried on, step by step through every episode, great and small.  It was such a retrospect as passes through the mind of one drowning.

With a vividness that was terrible yet exquisite, I saw Karamaneh, my lost love; I saw her first wrapped in a hooded opera-cloak, with her flower-like face and glorious dark eyes raised to me; I saw her in the gauzy Eastern raiment of a slave-girl, and I saw her in the dress of a gipsy.

Through moments sweet and bitter I lived again, through hours of suspense and days of ceaseless watching; through the long months of that first summer when my unhappy love came to me, and on, on, interminably on.  For years I lived again beneath that ghastly Yellow cloud.  I searched throughout the land of Egypt for Karamaneh and knew once more the sorrow of losing her.  Time ceased to exist for me.

Then, at the end of these strenuous years, I came at last to my meeting with Ki-Ming in the room with the golden door.  At this point my visionary adventures took a new turn.  I sat again upon the red-covered couch and listened, half stupefied, to the placid speech of the mandarin.  Again I came under the spell of his singular personality, and again, closing my eyes, I consented to be led from the room.

But, having crossed the threshold, a sudden awful doubt passed through my mind, arrow-like.  The hand that held my arm was bony and clawish; I could detect the presence of incredibly long finger nails—­nails long as those of some buried vampire of the black ages!

Choking down a cry of horror, I opened my eyes—­heedless of the promise given but a few moments earlier—­and looked into the face of my guide.

It was Dr. Fu-Manchu!...

Never, dreaming or waking, have I known a sensation identical with that which now clutched my heart; I thought that it must be death.  For ages, untold ages—­aeons longer than the world has known—­I looked into that still, awful face, into those unnatural green eyes.  I jerked my hand free from the Chinaman’s clutch and sprang back.

As I did so, I became miraculously translated from the threshold of the room with the golden door to our chambers in the court adjoining Fleet Street; I came into full possession of my faculties (or believed so at the time); I realized that I had nodded at my post, that I had dreamed a strange dream ... but I realized something else.  A ghoulish presence was in the room.

Snatching up my pistol from the table I turned.  Like some evil jinn of Arabian lore, Dr. Fu-Manchu, surrounded by a slight mist, stood looking at me!

Instantly I raised the pistol, leveled it steadily at the high, dome-like brow—­and fired!  There could be no possibility of missing at such short range, no possibility whatever ... and in the very instant of pulling the trigger the mist cleared, the lineaments of Dr. Fu-Manchu melted magically.  This was not the Chinese doctor who stood before me, at whose skull I still was pointing the deadly little weapon, into whose brain I had fired the bullet; it was Nayland Smith!