For hour after hour I lay thinking and in an irritated way listening for the chimes of the Ragnall stable-clock which once had adorned the tower of the church and struck the quarters with a damnable reiteration.  I concluded that Messrs. Harut and Marut were a couple of common Arab rogues such as I had seen performing at the African ports.  Then a quarter struck and I concluded that the elephants’ cemetery which I beheld in the smoke undoubtedly existed and that I meant to collar those thousands of pounds’ worth of ivory before I died.  Then after another quarter I concluded that there was no elephants’ cemetery—­although by the way my old friend, Dogeetah or Brother John, had mentioned such a thing to me—­but that probably there was a tribe, as he had also mentioned, called the Kendah, who worshipped a baby, or rather its effigy.

Well now, as had already occurred to me, the old Egyptians, of whom I was always fond of reading when I got a chance, also worshipped a child, Horus the Saviour.  And that child had a mother called Isis symbolized in the crescent moon, the great Nature goddess, the mistress of mysteries to whose cult ten thousand priests were sworn—­do not Herodotus and others, especially Apuleius, tell us all about her?  And by a queer coincidence Miss Holmes had the mark of a crescent moon upon her breast.  And when she was a child those two men, or others very like them, had pointed out that mark to each other.  And I had seen them staring hard at it that night.  And in her vapour-invoked dream the “Heavenly Child,” alias Horus, or the double of Horus, the Ka, I think the Egyptians called it, had awakened at the sight of her and kissed her and given her the necklace of the goddess, and—­all the rest.  What did it mean?

I went to sleep at last wondering what on earth it could mean, till presently that confounded clock woke me up again and I must go through the whole business once more.

By degrees, this was towards dawn, I became aware that all hope of rest had vanished from me utterly; that I was most painfully awake, and what is more, oppressed by a curious fear to the effect that something was going to happen to Miss Holmes.  So vivid did this fear become that at length I arose, lit a candle and dressed myself.  As it happened I knew where Miss Holmes slept.  Her room, which I had seen her enter, was on the same corridor as mine though at the other end of it near the head of a stair that ran I knew not whither.  In my portmanteau that had been sent over from Miss Manners’s house, amongst other things was a small double-barrelled pistol which from long habit I always carried with me loaded, except for the caps that were in a little leather case with some spare ammunition attached to the pistol belt.  I took it out, capped it and thrust it into my pocket.  Then I slipped from the room and stood behind a tall clock in the corridor, watching Miss Holmes’s door and reflecting what a fool I should look if anyone chanced to find me.