"You know best," said Horace.

"It was the splendour of that jewel and the majesty of his countenance
that rendered me afraid to enter his presence, lest he should recognise
me for what I am and command me to obey him, for verily his might is
greater even than Suleyman's, and his hand heavier upon such of the Jinn
as fall into his power!"

"If that's so," said Horace, "I should strongly advise you to find some
way of putting things straight before it's too late--you've no time to
lose."

"Thou sayest well," said Fakrash, springing to his feet, and turning his
face towards Cheapside. Horace shuffled himself along the ledge in a
seated position after the Jinnee, and, looking down between his feet,
could just see the tops of the thin and rusty trees in the churchyard,
the black and serried swarms of foreshortened people in the street, and
the scarlet-rimmed mouths of chimney-pots on the tiled roofs below.

"There is but one remedy I know," said the Jinnee, "and it may be that I
have lost power to perform it. Yet will I make the endeavour." And,
stretching forth his right hand towards the east, he muttered some kind
of command or invocation.

Horace almost fell off the cornice with apprehension of what might
follow. Would it be a thunderbolt, a plague, some frightful convulsion
of Nature? He felt sure that Fakrash would hesitate at no means, however
violent, of burying all traces of his blunder in oblivion, and very
little hope that, whatever he did, it would prove anything but some
worse indiscretion than his previous performances.

Happily none of these extreme measures seemed to have occurred to the
Jinnee, though what followed was strange and striking enough.

For presently, as if in obedience to the Jinnee's weird gesticulations,
a lurid belt of fog came rolling up from the direction of the Royal
Exchange, swallowing up building after building in its rapid course; one
by one the Guildhall, Bow Church, Cheapside itself, and the churchyard
disappeared, and Horace, turning his head to the left, saw the murky
tide sweeping on westward, blotting out Ludgate Hill, the Strand,
Charing Cross, and Westminster--till at last he and Fakrash were alone
above a limitless plain of bituminous cloud, the only living beings
left, as it seemed, in a blank and silent universe.

"Look again!" said Fakrash, and Horace, looking eastward, saw the spire
of Bow Church, rosy once more, the Guildhall standing clear and intact,
and th