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Page 103
CHAPTER XXV
I WAS being carried along a dimly lighted, tunnel-like place, slung, sackwise,
across the shoulder of a Burman. He was not a big man, but he supported
my considerable weight with apparent ease. A deadly nausea held me,
but the rough handling had served to restore me to consciousness.
My hands and feet were closely lashed. I hung limply as a wet towel:
I felt that this spark of tortured life which had flickered up in me must
ere long finally become extinguished.
A fancy possessed me, in these the first moments of my restoration
to the world of realities, that I had been smuggled into China;
and as I swung head downward I told myself that the huge,
puffy things which strewed the path were a species of giant toadstool,
unfamiliar to me and possibly peculiar to whatever district of China
I now was in.
The air was hot, steamy, and loaded with a smell as of rotting vegetation.
I wondered why my bearer so scrupulously avoided touching any of the
unwholesome-looking growths in passing through what seemed a succession
of cellars, but steered a tortuous course among the bloated, unnatural shapes,
lifting his bare brown feet with a catlike delicacy.
He passed under a low arch, dropped me roughly to the ground and ran back.
Half stunned, I lay watching the agile brown body melt into
the distances of the cellars. Their walls and roof seemed to emit
a faint, phosphorescent light.
"Petrie!" came a weak voice from somewhere ahead. . . .
"Is that you, Petrie?"
It was Nayland Smith!
"Smith!" I said, and strove to sit up. But the intense nausea overcame me,
so that I all but swooned.
I heard his voice again, but could attach no meaning to the words
which he uttered. A sound of terrific blows reached my ears, too.
The Burman reappeared, bending under the heavy load which he bore.
For, as he picked his way through the bloated things which grew
upon the floors of the cellars, I realized that he was carrying
the inert body of Inspector Weymouth. And I found time to compare
the strength of the little brown man with that of a Nile beetle,
which can raise many times its own weight. Then, behind him,
appeared a second figure, which immediately claimed the whole
of my errant attention.
"Fu-Manchu!" hissed my friend, from the darkness which concealed him.
It was indeed none other than Fu-Manchu--the Fu-Manchu whom we
had thought to be helpless. The deeps of the Chinaman's cunning--
the fine quality of his courage, were forced upon me as amazing facts.
He had assumed the appearance of a drugged opium-smoker so well
as to dupe me--a medical man; so well as to dupe Karamaneh--
whose experience of the noxious habit probably was greater than
my own. And, with the gallows dangling before him, he had waited--
played the part of a lure--whilst a body of police actually
surrounded the place!
I have since thought that the room probably was one which he actually used
for opium debauches, and the device of the trap was intended to protect him
during the comatose period.
Now, holding a lantern above his head, the deviser of the trap
whereinto we, mouselike, had blindly entered, came through
the cellars, following the brown man who carried Weymouth.
The faint rays of the lantern (it apparently contained a candle)
revealed a veritable forest of the gigantic fungi--poisonously colored--
hideously swollen--climbing from the floor up the slimy walls--
climbing like horrid parasites to such part of the arched roof
as was visible to me.
Fu-Manchu picked his way through the fungi ranks as daintily
as though the distorted, tumid things had been viper-headed.
The resounding blows which I had noted before, and which had never ceased,
culminated in a splintering crash. Dr. Fu-Manchu and his servant,
who carried the apparently insensible detective, passed in under
the arch, Fu-Manchu glancing back once along the passages.
The lantern he extinguished, or concealed; and whilst I waited,
my mind dully surveying memories of all the threats which this
uncanny being had uttered, a distant clamor came to my ears.
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