rate fingers. Blood was tricking down her fair brow, and she was
now laughing a hard, harsh, mirthless laugh, now bursting into violent
wringing sobs, now rending her bodice and striking at her bare bosom,
as the wind roared in through the open window, and the rain poured in
torrents and soaked her through and through.

All night there was no cessation of the storm or of the passionate cry.
I wandered from room to room in the dark, with unavailing sorrow. Whom
could I console when no one was by? Whose was this intense agony of
sorrow? Whence arose this inconsolable grief?

And the mad man cried out: "Stand back! Stand back!! All is false! All
is false!!"

I saw that the day had dawned, and Meher Ali was going round and round
the palace with his usual cry in that dreadful weather. Suddenly it
came to me that perhaps he also had once lived in that house, and that,
though he had gone mad, he came there every day, and went round and
round, fascinated by the weird spell cast by the marble demon.

Despite the storm and rain I ran to him and asked: "Ho, Meher Ali, what
is false?"

The man answered nothing, but pushing me aside went round and round
with his frantic cry, like a bird flying fascinated about the jaws of a
snake, and made a desperate effort to warn himself by repeating: "Stand
back! Stand back!! All is false! All is false!!"

I ran like a mad man through the pelting rain to my office, and asked
Karim Khan: "Tell me the meaning of all this!"

What I gathered from that old man was this: That at one time countless
unrequited passions and unsatisfied longings and lurid flames of wild
blazing pleasure raged within that palace, and that the curse of all
the heart-aches and blasted hopes had made its every stone thirsty and
hungry, eager to swallow up like a famished ogress any living man who
might chance to approach. Not one of those who lived there for three
consecutive nights could escape these cruel jaws, save Meher Ali, who
had escaped at the cost of his reason.

I asked: "Is there no means whatever of my release?" The old man said:
"There is only one means, and that is very difficult. I will tell you
what it is, but first you must hear the history of a young Persian girl
who once lived in that pleasure-dome. A stranger or a more bitterly
heart-rending tragedy was never enacted on this earth."

Just at this moment the coolies announced that the train was coming.
So soon? We hurriedly packed up our luggage,