Page:The Mating of the Blades.djvu/126



“Where is Hyder Ahmed's Gully?” he asked a native.

“Over there, saheb!”

The man pointed and, with a word of thanks, Hector was off again, through streets that grew steadily more narrow and crooked, with a glimpse of smoky, discouraged sky above the roof tops revealing scarcely three yards of breadth, the roadway ankle deep in squidgy, sticky blue slime, beggars and roughs and lepers slinking and pushing against him, and a fetid stink hanging over it all like an evil pall; until, directed by another native who, like the policeman, gave him good-natured warning and advised him to return to his hotel, he found himself in Hyder Ahmet Khan's Gully, a long, crooked cul-de-sac that ran the gamut of white-washed walls without windows or doors, mysterious, useless looking, and that was sealed at the farther end by a tall, lonely house, rising into the purple welter of the night with an immense abandon of fretted, tortured stone and masonry work, with bird's-nest balconies and crazy, twisted, bulbous roofs and spires, the whole thing typically Hindu in its maniacal, architectural extravagance.

Not a soul was about. There was not even a sound. It was as if all life had been cut short at the entrance of the Gully, and everything Hector was—racially, traditionally, culturally—bristled within him. He saw a glimmer of burnished metal, bent, looked, and saw that it was the lock of a door set low into the house, to the left of it a brass plate with the name of Mehmet Iddrissy Khan engraved in Persian letters, to the right an old-fashioned, iron knocker.

He stood undecided, rather frightened. Somehow,