by swallowing
all the whisky in town. I suppose I had a glorious time--I don't
remember much about it. But about a week later I came to one evening
in Kim Chee's place, with a dollar and five cents in my pocket, a
blazing stomach, and a troupe of goblins affixed to my person as a
retinue.

"Kim Chee is the oldest, most wrinkled-up Chinaman in the world. He
has had that drinking den in Honolulu for forty years--ran it in the
old days when the King and the Opium Ring governed Hawaii. It has
always been a sailor resort; in the old days it was a whalemen's
rendezvous. Fine old gentleman, Kim Chee.

"I couldn't drink any more, and I was jumpy. So Kim Chee ushered me
into his Chamber of Horrors. The Chamber of Horrors is an institution
at Kim's place. It is a rubbish room, filled with the junk the old
Chinaman has collected during a lifetime, and whenever one of his
patrons gets the horrors from imbibing his bottled dynamite, Kim chucks
him into this room to die or get over it as the Fates decree.

"So I found myself in this room, with an old lantern for light. I was
in a bad way. I was seeing things. Not alligators or monkeys, such as
the conventional drunk is supposed to see, but Things, faceless
formless Things who brushed against me and leered at me out of the
corners. _Urrgh_! The memory makes me quake.

"I was afraid of losing control of myself, and to keep myself occupied,
and my tormentors in the background, I commenced to paw over the junk
pile. I was searching for something to read.

"Well, there was an assortment in that room that would have gladdened
the heart of any collector--native weapons from all the islands of the
Pacific, carved whalebone from the North, knickknacks from wherenot,
everything that a couple of generations of sailormen could leave behind
them. There were sea-chests and sea-bags that belonged to men who, I
doubt not, were drowned before I was born. But nowhere did I find what
I sought--something to read.

"I was about to give up the search when I picked up a small package,
oilskin-wrapped and securely tied with marlin. It had lain in that
corner for a long, long time. It was covered with dust, and the
oilskin was brittle dry. The package felt like a book. I opened it,
and found I had John Winters's diary in my hand.

"I read that inscription on the fly-leaf, but I must confess that I
didn't think of Fire Mountain at the moment. That came later. But I
was intereste