In this same infirmary there was one surgical ward—­for in a listless mood I went over it—­where the patients had died, not of the poison, nor of suffocation, but of hunger:  for the doctors, or someone, had made the long room air-tight, double-boarding the windows, felting the doors, and then locking them outside; they themselves may have perished before their precautions for the imprisoned patients were complete:  for I found a heap of maimed shapes, mere skeletons, crowded round the door within.  I knew very well that they had not died of the cloud-poison, for the pestilence of the ward was unmixed with that odour of peach which did not fail to have more or less embalming effects upon the bodies which it saturated.  I rushed stifling from that place; and thinking it a pity, and a danger, that such a horror should be, I at once set to work to gather combustibles to burn the building to the ground.

It was while I sat in an arm-chair in the street the next afternoon, smoking, and watching the flames of this structure, that something was suddenly born in me, something from the lowest Hell:  and I smiled a smile that never yet man smiled.  And I said:  ’I will burn, I will burn:  I will return to London....’

* * * * *

While I was on this Eastward journey, stopping for the night at the town of Swindon, I had a dream:  for I dreamed that a little brown bald old man, with a bent back, whose beard ran in one thin streamlet of silver from his chin to trail along the ground, said to me:  ’You think that you are alone on the earth, its sole Despot:  well, have your fling:  but as sure as God lives, as God lives, as God lives’—­he repeated it six times—­’sooner or later, later or sooner, you will meet another....’

And I started from that frightful sleep with the brow of a corpse, wet with sweat....

* * * * *

I returned to London on the 29th of March, arriving within a hundred yards of the Northern Station one windy dark evening about eight, where I alighted, and walked to Euston Road, then eastward along it, till I came to a shop which I knew to be a jeweller’s, though it was too dark to see any painted words.  The door, to my annoyance, was locked, like nearly all the shop-doors in London:  I therefore went looking near the ground, and into a cart, for something heavy, very soon saw a labourer’s ponderous boots, cut one from the shrivelled foot, and set to beat at the glass till it came raining; then knocked away the bottom splinters, and entered.

No horrors now at that clatter of broken glass; no sick qualms; my pulse steady; my head high; my step royal; my eye cold and calm.

* * * * *

Eight months previously, I had left London a poor burdened, cowering wight.  I could scream with laughter now at that folly!  But it did not last long.  I returned to it—­the Sultan.

* * * * *