The lights were all cloaked in the front of the house when we arrived.  I could hear awful noises from behind the seal cutter’s shop front, as if some one were groaning his soul out.  Suddhoo shook all over, and while we groped our way upstairs told me that the jadoo had begun.  Janoo and Azizun met us at the stair head, and told us that the jadoo work was coming off in their rooms, because there was more space there.  Janoo is a lady of a freethinking turn of mind.  She whispered that the jadoo was an invention to get money out of Suddhoo, and that the seal cutter would go to a hot place when he died.  Suddhoo was nearly crying with fear and old age.  He kept walking up and down the room in the half light, repeating his son’s name over and over again, and asking Azizun if the seal cutter ought not to make a reduction in the case of his own landlord.  Janoo pulled me over to the shadow in the recess of the carved bow-windows.  The boards were up, and the rooms were only lit by one tiny oil lamp.  There was no chance of my being seen if I stayed still.

Presently, the groans below ceased, and we heard steps on the staircase.  That was the seal cutter.  He stopped outside the door as the terrier barked and Azizun fumbled at the chain, and he told Suddhoo to blow out the lamp.  This left the place in jet darkness, except for the red glow from the two huqas that belonged to Janoo and Azizun.  The seal cutter came in, and I heard Suddhoo throw himself down on the floor and groan.  Azizun caught her breath, and Janoo backed on to one of the beds with a shudder.  There was a clink of something metallic, and then shot up a pale blue-green flame near the ground.  The light was just enough to show Azizun, pressed against one corner of the room with the terrier between her knees; Janoo, with her hands clasped, leaning forward as she sat on the bed; Suddhoo, face down, quivering, and the seal cutter.

I hope I may never see another man like that seal cutter.  He was stripped to the waist, with a wreath of white jasmine as thick as my wrist round his forehead, a salmon-colored loin-cloth round his middle, and a steel bangle on each ankle.  This was not awe-inspiring.  It was the face of the man that turned me cold.  It was blue-gray in the first place.  In the second, the eyes were rolled back till you could only see the whites of them; and, in the third, the face was the face of a demon—­a ghoul—­anything you please except of the sleek, oily old ruffian who sat in the daytime over his turning-lathe downstairs.  He was lying on his stomach with his arms turned and crossed behind him, as if he had been thrown down pinioned.  His head and neck were the only parts of him off the floor.  They were nearly at right angles to the body, like the head of a cobra at spring.  It was ghastly.  In the center of the room, on the bare earth floor, stood a big, deep, brass basin, with a pale blue-green light floating in the center