Page:Richard Marsh--The joss, a reversion.djvu/316

304 nothing of him. Where he is I don’t know. Unless he’s above.”

He was above. In a room at the top of the house. With another door to it. So that we had to get through the wall again.

He had had a sort of throne rigged up. Intending, maybe, to have an imitation of the one which he had occupied when I had first come upon him in the temple. If that was so the imitation was a precious poor one. But he was on it. Dead. And cold. He had been gone some hours.

Whether he had committed suicide, or whether the end had come to him in the ordinary course of nature, there was nothing to show.

A colony of snakes was in the room. Those favourites of his. One shared the throne with the Great Joss. It was on the seat, in front of him, where his legs ought to have been. My idea was that the thing had killed him. But it seemed that that was not the case. The creatures were declared not to be venomous. And there was no mark of a snake-bite about him anyhow.

While we stood looking at the throne, and what was on it, there was a movement behind. The cursing gentleman and his two friends came in. At sight of the Great Joss they threw themselves on their faces, and bit the floor. I never saw men so scared. Or so surprised. I had a sort of notion that they had supposed him to be immortal, and that he couldn’t die. When the body came to be examined, and it was discovered what a torso it really was, and to what prolonged and hideous tortures the man must have been subjected, one began to understand that they might have had reasons of their own for thinking so. It might very well have been incomprehensible to them why, if he could die, he hadn’t died.

At the foot of the throne was the little doll-like thing which I had seen perched on the head of the