When I regained consciousness I found myself lying upon the bare floor of a room of a peculiar shape that suggested it was the portion of the arc of a circle lying between the peripheries of two concentric circles. The narrow end of the room curved inward, the wider end outward. In the latter was a single, grated window; no door or other openings appeared in any of the walls, which were covered with the same silver fabric that I had noticed upon the walls and ceilings of the palace of the jed. Near me lay Nur An, evidently still under the influence of the opiate that had been administered to us in the wine. Again I looked about the room. I arose and went to the window. Far below me I saw the roofs of the city. Evidently we were imprisoned in the lofty tower that rose from the center of the palace of the jed, but how had we been brought into the room? Certainly not through the window, which must have been fully two hundred feet above the city. While I was pondering this seemingly unanswerable problem, Nur An regained consciousness. At first he did not speak; he just lay there looking at me with a rueful smile upon his lips. "Well?" I asked. Nur An shook his head. "We still live," he said dismally, "but that is about the best that one may say." "We are in the palace of a maniac, Nur An," I said. "There is no doubt in my mind as to that. Everyone here lives in constant terror of Ghron and from what I have seen today they are warranted in feeling terror." "Yet I believe we saw little or nothing at that," said Nur An. "I saw enough," I replied. "Those girls were so beautiful," he said after a moment's silence. "I could not believe that such beauty and such duplicity could exist together." "Perhaps they were the unwilling tools of a cruel master," I suggested. "I shall always like to think so," he said. The day waned and night fell; no one came near us, but in the meantime I discovered something. Accidentally leaning against the wall at the narrow end of our room I found that it was very warm, in fact quite hot, and from this I inferred that the flue of the chimney from which we had seen the smoke issuing rose through the center of the tower and the wall of the chimney formed the rear wall of our apartment. It was a discovery, but at the moment it meant nothing to us.