“Ah!” I said, “that is clever, but not quite clever enough.  They have mixed the stalks.  I noted that the purple fig had the stalk of a green fig, and that is why I tried it on the monkey.”

“You observe well, General.”

“Yes, Physician, I observe.  I learned that when, as a lad, I hunted game in the far North.  Also I learned to keep silent, since noise frightens game.  Do you as much.”

“Have no fear,” he answered; and went about his business with the dead monkey.

When he had gone I thought a while.  Then I rose, and went to the chapel of the prison, or, rather, to a place whence I could see those in the chapel without being seen.  This chapel was situated in a gloomy crypt, lighted only with oil lamps that hung from the massive pillars and arches.  The day was the Sabbath of the Christians, and when I entered the little secret hollow in the walls, the sacrament was being administered to certain of the prisoners.

Truly it was a sad sight, for the ministering priest was none other than the Caesar Nicephorus, the eldest of the Emperor’s uncles, who had been first ordained in order that he might be unfit to sit upon the throne, and afterwards blinded, as I have told.  He was a tall, pale man, with an uncertain mouth and a little pointed chin, apparently between forty and fifty years of age, and his face was made dreadful by two red hollows where the eyes should have been.  Yet, notwithstanding this disfigurement, and his tonsured crown, and the broidered priest’s robes which hung upon him awkwardly, as he stumbled through the words of his office, to this poor victim there still seemed to cling some air of royal birth and bearing.  Being blind, he could not see to administer the Element, and therefore his hand was guided by one of his imperial brethren, who also had been made a priest.  The tongue of this priest had been slit, but now and again he gibbered some direction into the ear of Nicephorus.  By the altar, watching all, sat a stern-faced monk, the confessor of the Caesars and of the Nobilissimi, who was put there to spy upon them.

I followed the rite to its end, observing these unhappy prisoners seeking from the mystery of their faith the only consolation that remained to them.  Many of them were men innocent of any crime, save that of adherence to some fallen cause, political or religious; victims were they, not sinners, to be released by death alone.  I remember that, as the meaning of the scene came home to me, I recalled the words of Irene, who had said that she believed this world to be a hell, and found weight in them.  At length, able to bear no more, I left my hiding-place and went into the garden behind the chapel.  Here, at least, were natural things.  Here flowers, tended by the prisoners, bloomed as they might have done in some less accursed spot.  Here the free birds sang and nested in the trees, for what to them were the high surrounding walls?