The room was not a large one, but lofty.  Even in the semi-darkness of the very faint greenish lustre radiated from an open censerlike lampas of fretted gold in the centre of the domed encausted roof, a certain incongruity of barbaric gorgeousness in the furnishing filled me with amazement.  The air was heavy with the scented odour of this light, and the fumes of the narcotic cannabis sativa—­the base of the bhang of the Mohammedans—­in which I knew it to be the habit of my friend to assuage himself.  The hangings were of wine-coloured velvet, heavy, gold-fringed and embroidered at Nurshedabad.  All the world knew Prince Zaleski to be a consummate cognoscente—­a profound amateur—­as well as a savant and a thinker; but I was, nevertheless, astounded at the mere multitudinousness of the curios he had contrived to crowd into the space around him.  Side by side rested a palaeolithic implement, a Chinese ‘wise man,’ a Gnostic gem, an amphora of Graeco-Etruscan work.  The general effect was a bizarrerie of half-weird sheen and gloom.  Flemish sepulchral brasses companied strangely with runic tablets, miniature paintings, a winged bull, Tamil scriptures on lacquered leaves of the talipot, mediaeval reliquaries richly gemmed, Brahmin gods.  One whole side of the room was occupied by an organ whose thunder in that circumscribed place must have set all these relics of dead epochs clashing and jingling in fantastic dances.  As I entered, the vaporous atmosphere was palpitating to the low, liquid tinkling of an invisible musical box.  The prince reclined on a couch from which a draping of cloth-of-silver rolled torrent over the floor.  Beside him, stretched in its open sarcophagus which rested on three brazen trestles, lay the mummy of an ancient Memphian, from the upper part of which the brown cerements had rotted or been rent, leaving the hideousness of the naked, grinning countenance exposed to view.

Discarding his gemmed chibouque and an old vellum reprint of Anacreon, Zaleski rose hastily and greeted me with warmth, muttering at the same time some commonplace about his ‘pleasure’ and the ‘unexpectedness’ of my visit.  He then gave orders to Ham to prepare me a bed in one of the adjoining chambers.  We passed the greater part of the night in a delightful stream of that somnolent and half-mystic talk which Prince Zaleski alone could initiate and sustain, during which he repeatedly pressed on me a concoction of Indian hemp resembling hashish, prepared by his own hands, and quite innocuous.  It was after a simple breakfast the next morning that I entered on the subject which was partly the occasion of my visit.  He lay back on his couch, volumed in a Turkish beneesh, and listened to me, a little wearily perhaps at first, with woven fingers, and the pale inverted eyes of old anchorites and astrologers, the moony greenish light falling on his always wan features.

‘You knew Lord Pharanx?’ I asked.