“Your pulse is weak and very rapid,” I said slowly, in a professional tone.  “You seem to me to have fallen into a perilous condition.”

At the sound of my voice, he gave a sudden start.  Yet even so, for a second, he did not open his eyes.  The revelation of my presence seemed to come upon him as in a dream.  “Like Cumberledge’s,” he muttered to himself, gasping.  “Exactly like Cumberledge’s. . . .  But Cumberledge is dead . . .  I must be delirious. . . .  If I didn’t know to the contrary, I could have sworn it was Cumberledge’s!”

I spoke again, bending over him.  “How long have the glandular swellings been present, Professor?” I asked, with quiet deliberativeness.

This time he opened his eyes sharply, and looked up in my face.  He swallowed a great gulp of surprise.  His breath came and went.  He raised himself on his elbows and stared at me with a fixed stare.  “Cumberledge!” he cried; “Cumberledge!  Come back to life, then!  They told me you were dead!  And here you are, Cumberledge!”

“Who told you I was dead?” I asked, sternly.

He stared at me, still in a dazed way.  He was more than half comatose.  “Your guide, Ram Das,” he answered at last, half incoherently.  “He came back by himself.  Came back without you.  He swore to me he had seen all your throats cut in Tibet.  He alone had escaped.  The Buddhists had massacred you.”

“He told you a lie,” I said, shortly.

“I thought so.  I thought so.  And I sent him back for confirmatory evidence.  But the rogue has never brought it.”  He let his head drop on his rude pillow heavily.  “Never, never brought it!”

I gazed at him, full of horror.  The man was too ill to hear me, too ill to reason, too ill to recognise the meaning of his own words, almost.  Otherwise, perhaps, he would hardly have expressed himself quite so frankly.  Though to be sure he had said nothing to criminate himself in any way; his action might have been due to anxiety for our safety.

I fixed my glance on him long and dubiously.  What ought I to do next?  As for Sebastian, he lay with his eyes closed, half oblivious of my presence.  The fever had gripped him hard.  He shivered, and looked helpless as a child.  In such circumstances, the instincts of my profession rose imperative within me.  I could not nurse a case properly in this wretched hut.  The one thing to be done was to carry the patient down to our camp in the valley.  There, at least, we had air and pure running water.

I asked a few questions from the retired gentleman as to the possibility of obtaining sufficient bearers in the village.  As I supposed, any number were forthcoming immediately.  Your Nepaulese is by nature a beast of burden; he can carry anything up and down the mountains, and spends his life in the act of carrying.

I pulled out my pencil, tore a leaf from my note-book, and scribbled a hasty note to Hilda:  “The invalid is—­whom do you think?—­Sebastian!  He is dangerously ill with some malignant fever.  I am bringing him down into camp to nurse.  Get everything ready for him.”  Then I handed it over to a messenger, found for me by the retired gentleman, to carry to Hilda.  My host himself I could not spare, as he was my only interpreter.