ed upon the dirty table and his pointed chin upon his long,
bony hands.

Into those uncanny eyes I stared, those eyes, long, narrow, and
slightly oblique, their brilliant, catlike greenness sometimes horribly
filmed, like the eyes of some grotesque bird....

Thus it began; and from this point I was carried on, step by step
through every episode, great and small. It was such a retrospect as
passes through the mind of one drowning.

With a vividness that was terrible yet exquisite, I saw Karamaneh, my
lost love; I saw her first wrapped in a hooded opera-cloak, with her
flower-like face and glorious dark eyes raised to me; I saw her in the
gauzy Eastern raiment of a slave-girl, and I saw her in the dress of
a gipsy.

Through moments sweet and bitter I lived again, through hours of
suspense and days of ceaseless watching; through the long months of
that first summer when my unhappy love came to me, and on, on,
interminably on. For years I lived again beneath that ghastly Yellow
cloud. I searched throughout the land of Egypt for Karamaneh and knew
once more the sorrow of losing her. Time ceased to exist for me.

Then, at the end of these strenuous years, I came at last to my
meeting with Ki-Ming in the room with the golden door. At this point
my visionary adventures took a new turn. I sat again upon the
red-covered couch and listened, half stupefied, to the placid speech
of the mandarin. Again I came under the spell of his singular
personality, and again, closing my eyes, I consented to be led from
the room.

But, having crossed the threshold, a sudden awful doubt passed through
my mind, arrow-like. The hand that held my arm was bony and clawish;
I could detect the presence of incredibly long finger nails--nails
long as those of some buried vampire of the black ages!

Choking down a cry of horror, I opened my eyes--heedless of the
promise given but a few moments earlier--and looked into the face of
my guide.

It was Dr. Fu-Manchu!...

Never, dreaming or waking, have I known a sensation identical with
that which now clutched my heart; I thought that it must be death.
For ages, untold ages--aeons longer than the world has known--I looked
into that still, awful face, into those unnatural green eyes. I jerked
my hand free from the Chinaman's clutch and sprang back.

As I did so, I became miraculously translated from the threshold of
the room with the golden door to our chambers in the court adjoining
Fleet Street;