nd, or guessed,
that his way was no longer straight. Underfoot there was mud and
garbage that once gulfed him to the knee, and nowhere in all those
terrible, silent walls on each side of him was there a light or a
door, nor any sight of life near at hand. He might have been in a
catacomb, companioned by the dead.

The stillness and the loneliness scared and disturbed him. He turned
on a sudden impulse to make his way back to the lights of the street.

But this was to reckon without the map of Mozambique--which does not
exist. Ten minutes sufficed to overwhelm him in an intricacy of blind
ways. He groped by a wall to a turning, fared cautiously to pass it,
found a blank wall opposite him, and was lost. His sense of direction
left him, and he had no longer any idea of where the street lay and
where the sea. He floundered in gross darkness, inept and
persistent. It took some time, many turnings, and a tumble in the mud
to convince him that he was lost. And then the rain came down in
earnest.

It roared, it pelted, it stamped on him. It was not rain, as he knew
it: it was a cascade, a vehement and malignant assault by all the
wetness in heaven. It whipped, it stung, it thrashed; he was drenched
in a moment as though by a trick. He could see nothing, but groped
blind and frightened under it, feeling along the wall with one hand,
still carrying the bronze image by the head with the other. Once he
dropped it, and would have left it, but with an impulse like an
effort of self-respect, he searched for it, groping elbow-deep in the
slush and water, found it, and stumbled on. Another corner presented
itself; he came round it, and almost at once a light showed itself.

It was a slit of brightness below a door, and without a question the
drenched and bewildered Dawson lifted the image and hammered on the
door with it. A hum of voices within abated as he knocked, and there
was silence. He hammered again, and he heard bolts being withdrawn
inside. The door opened slowly, and a man looked out.

"I've lost my way," flustered Dawson pitifully. "I'm wet through, and
I don't know where I am." Even as he spoke the rain was cutting
through his clothes like blades. "Please let me in;" he concluded.
"Please let me in."

The man was backed by the light, and Dawson could see nothing of him
save that he was tall and stoutly made. But he laughed, and opened
the door a foot farther to let him pass in.

"Come in," he bade him. His voice was