s if the old, good-easy, meek-eyed man of science, dying, had left his
effectual curse on all the world, and had thereby converted
civilisation into one omnivorous grave, one universal charnel-house. I
spent several days in reading out to Zaleski accounts of particular
deaths as they had occurred. He seemed never to tire of listening,
lying back for the most part on the silver-cushioned couch, and wearing
an inscrutable mask. Sometimes he rose and paced the carpet with
noiseless foot-fall, his steps increasing to the swaying, uneven
velocity of an animal in confinement as a passage here or there
attracted him, and then subsiding into their slow regularity again. At
any interruption in the reading, he would instantly turn to me with a
certain impatience, and implore me to proceed; and when our stock of
matter failed, he broke out into actual anger that I had not brought
more with me. Henceforth the negro, Ham, using my trap, daily took a
double journey--one before sunrise, and one at dusk--to the nearest
townlet, from which he would return loaded with newspapers. With
unimaginable eagerness did both Zaleski and I seize, morning after
morning, and evening after evening, on these budgets, to gloat for long
hours over the ever-lengthening tale of death. As for him, sleep
forsook him. He was a man of small reasonableness, scorning the
limitations of human capacity; his palate brooked no meat when his
brain was headlong in the chase; even the mild narcotics which were now
his food and drink seemed to lose something of their power to mollify,
to curb him. Often rising from slumber in what I took to be the dead of
night--though of day or night there could be small certainty in that
dim dwelling--I would peep into the domed chamber, and see him there
under the livid-green light of the censer, the leaden smoke issuing
from his lips, his eyes fixed unweariedly on a square piece of ebony
which rested on the coffin of the mummy near him. On this ebony he had
pasted side by side several woodcuts--snipped from the newspapers--of
the figures traced on the pieces of papyrus found in the mouths of the
dead. I could see, as time passed, that he was concentrating all his
powers on these figures; for the details of the deaths themselves were
all of a dreary sameness, offering few salient points for
investigation. In those cases where the suicide had left behind him
clear evidence of the means by which he had committed the act, there
was noth