about to speak, when it suddenly struck me that the man's face had undergone a change.
It was growing thin and shadowy, his whole body also seemed to be assuming a certain vapory indistinctness, to become etherealized, so to speak.
As he stood there motionless before the wall, I gazed at him in speechless amazement. Was it actually as I saw it, or was the trouble with my own brain?
He seemed to be sinking slowly downward, his feet and legs disappeared, seemingly dissolving as he went, until nothing but the head rested on the ground.
I was horrified, amazed beyond all telling.
Meanwhile every surrounding object retained its distinctness—the lantern above the wall burned as brightly as before.
From that dreadful head I struggled to remove my gaze in vain. Thinner and still more shadowy it became, until suddenly, as a puff of wind wafts away the last flickering flame of a burnt-out candle, it vanished.
The man had faded away before my eyes, leaving me to face the mob alone.
CHAPTER II.
THE SHADOWS OF THE NAGKON WAT.
The mists still hung thick above the forests when we reached a resting place on those seemingly interminable steps and leaned panting for breath against the embrasure of one of the little windows up near the top of the grand central pagoda of the Nagkon Wat. Far below us—two hundred and fifty feet is said to be the height of the pagoda—lay the tropical jungle, with its nodding atap palms alive with the screams of monkeys, the notes of peacocks, quails and parrots, a dense mass of green stretching off as far as the eye could reach. At our feet was the inner court of that strange old temple, the very name of whose builders is lost in the mists of ages, the sloping roofs, projecting cornices and crumbling columns gilded by the first rays of the rising sun.
“Too late!” exclaimed Maurice De Veber; “too late
