“I saw no feather cap or snake,” said Ragnall.

“Then that’s the oddest part of the whole business,” I remarked.  “Go back to your room, both of you, and if you see anything more, call me.  I want to think things over.”

They went, in a bewildered sort of fashion, and I called Hans and spoke with him in a whisper, repeating to him the little that he had not understood of our talk, for as I have said, although he never spoke it, Hans knew a great deal of English.

“Now, Hans,” I said to him, “what is the use of you?  You are no better than a fraud.  You pretend to be the best watchdog in Africa, and yet a woman comes into this house under your nose and in the grey of the morning, and you do not see her.  Where is your reputation, Hans?”

The old fellow grew almost speechless with indignation, then he spluttered his answer: 

“It was not a woman, Baas, but a spook.  Who am I that I should be expected to catch spooks as though they were thieves or rats?  As it happens I was wide awake half an hour before the dawn and lay with my eyes fixed upon that door, which I bolted myself last night.  It never opened, Baas; moreover, since this talk began I have been to look at it.  During the night a spider has made its web from door-post to door-post, and that web is unbroken.  If you do not believe me, come and see for yourself.  Yet they say the woman came through the doorway and therefore through the spider’s web.  Oh!  Baas, what is the use of wasting thought upon the ways of spooks which, like the wind, come and go as they will, especially in this haunted land from which, as we have all agreed, we should do well to get away.”

I went and examined the door for myself, for by now my sciatica, or whatever it may have been, was so much better that I could walk a little.  What Hans said was true.  There was the spider’s web with the spider sitting in the middle.  Also some of the threads of the web were fixed from post to post, so that it was impossible that the door could have been opened or, if opened, that anyone could have passed through the doorway without breaking them.  Therefore, unless the woman came through one of the little window-places, which was almost incredible as they were high above the ground, or dropped from the smoke-hole in the roof, or had been shut into the place when the door was closed on the previous night, I could not see how she had arrived there.  And if any one of these incredible suppositions was correct, then how did she get out again with two men watching her?

There were only two solutions to the problem—­namely, that the whole occurrence was hallucination, or that, in fact, Ragnall and Savage had seen something unnatural and uncanny.  If the latter were correct I only wished that I had shared the experience, as I have always longed to see a ghost.  A real, indisputable ghost would be a great support to our doubting minds, that is if we knew its owner to be dead.