A stone’s throw out on either hand
    From that well-ordered road we tread,
      And all the world is wild and strange;
    Churel and ghoul and Djinn and sprite
    Shall bear us company to-night,
    For we have reached the Oldest Land
      Wherein the Powers of Darkness range.

_—­From the Dusk to the Dawn._

The house of Suddhoo, near the Taksali Gate, is two storied, with four carved windows of old brown wood, and a flat roof.  You may recognize it by five red handprints arranged like the Five of Diamonds on the whitewash between the upper windows.  Bhagwan Dass, the bunnia, and a man who says he gets his living by seal-cutting live in the lower story with a troop of wives, servants, friends, and retainers.  The two upper rooms used to be occupied by Janoo and Azizun and a little black-and-tan terrier that was stolen from an Englishman’s house and given to Janoo by a soldier.  To-day, only Janoo lives in the upper rooms.  Suddhoo sleeps on the roof generally, except when he sleeps in the street.  He used to go to Peshawar in the cold weather to visit his son, who sells curiosities near the Edwardes’ Gate, and then he slept under a real mud roof.  Suddhoo is a great friend of mine, because his cousin had a son who secured, thanks to my recommendation, the post of head messenger to a big firm in the Station.  Suddhoo says that God will make me a Lieutenant-Governor one of these days.  I daresay his prophecy will come true.  He is very, very old, with white hair and no teeth worth showing, and he has outlived his wits—­outlived nearly everything except his fondness for his son at Peshawar.  Janoo and Azizun are Kashmiris, Ladies of the City, and theirs was an ancient and more or less honorable profession; but Azizun has since married a medical student from the Northwest and has settled down to a most respectable life somewhere near Bareilly.  Bhagwan Dass is an extortionate and an adulterator.  He is very rich.  The man who is supposed to get his living by seal cutting pretends to be very poor.  This lets you know as much as is necessary of the four principal tenants in the house of Suddhoo.  Then there is Me, of course; but I am only the chorus that comes in at the end to explain things.  So I do not count.

Suddhoo was not clever.  The man who pretended to cut seals was the cleverest of them all—­Bhagwan Dass only knew how to lie—­except Janoo.  She was also beautiful, but that was her own affair.

Suddhoo’s son at Peshawar was attacked by pleurisy, and old Suddhoo was troubled.  The seal-cutter man heard of Suddhoo’s anxiety and made capital out of it.  He was abreast of the times.  He got a friend in Peshawar to telegraph daily accounts of the son’s health.  And here the story begins.