Page:Lieut Gullivar Jones - His Vacation - Edwin Arnold (1905).djvu/302

 go. I threw two tables into a gap, and brained a besieger with a sweetmeat-seller's block and smothered another, and overturned a great chest against my barricade; but what was the purpose of it all? They were fifty to one and my rampart quaked before them. The smoke was stifling, and the pains of dissolution in my heart. They burst in and clambered up the rampart like black ants. I looked round for still one more thing to hurl into the breach. My eyes lit on a roll of carpet: I seized it by one corner meaning to drag it to the doorway, and it came undone at a touch.

That strange, that incredible pattern! Where in all the vicissitudes of a chequered career had I seen such a one before? I stared at it in amazement under the very spears of the woodmen in the red glare of Hath's burning palace. Then all on a sudden it burst upon me that it was the accursed rug, the very one which in response to a careless wish had swept me out of my own dear world, and forced me to take as wild a journey into space as ever fell to a man's lot since the universe was made!

And in another second it occurred to me that if it had brought me hither it might take me hence. It was but a chance, yet worth trying when all other chances were against me.

As Ar-hap's men came shouting over the barricade I threw myself down upon that in-