"I have been re-reading Humboldt," said Medway Ashendyne. "What do you say, Gipsy, to risking a South American Revolution? Venezuela--Colombia--Sail from New York in September--and if you wanted ten days at Gilead Balm--" Their drawing-room looked pleasantly out over gardens; indeed, so closely came the trees, there was a green and shimmering light in the room. It was May, and the sounds of the London streets floated pleasantly in at the open windows with the pleasant morning breeze. The waiter had taken away Medway's breakfast paraphernalia. Hagar had breakfasted much earlier. Thomson stood at the back of the room arranging upon a small table, which presently would be moved within reach of Medway's hand, smoking apparatus, papers, magazines, and what not. That eight-years-past prolonged sojourn and convalescence in Egypt had produced a liking for Mahomet, and Medway had annexed him as he annexed all possible things that he liked and that could serve him. Mahomet, speaking English now, but still in the costume of the East, had just brought in a pannier of flowers. They were all over the room, in tall vases. "Too many," said Hagar's eyes; but Medway who, when he was in search of the rarefied pleasure of adventure and novelty in strange and barbarous places, could be as ascetic as a red Indian on the warpath, loved, when he rocked in the trough of the waves, to rock in a bower. "Cartagena would be our port. There's a railroad, I believe, to Calamar. Then up the Magdalena by some kind of a steamboat to Giradot. Then get to Bogotá as best we might. There's an interesting life there, eight thousand feet above the sea, with schools and letters, and governments in and governments out, and cool mountain water running downwards through the city, and the houses built low because of the earthquakes. Let us go up the Magdalena and across to Bogotá, Gipsy!" He sat in the wheel-chair he had himself designed, a wonderfully light and graceful affair,--considering,--with wonderful places alongside and beneath for wonderful things. His crutches were there, slung alongside, ready to his hand, and wicker detachable receptacles for writing-things and sketching-block and pencils and the book he was reading and so forth. Where he travelled now, the wheel-chair must travel. He was good with crutches for a hundred paces or two; then he must sit down and gather force for the next hundred. He suffered at times--not at all constantly--a good deal of pain. But with all of this understood, he yet looked a vigorous person,--fresh, hale, well-favoured, with not a grey hair,--a young man still. "Bogotá," he said, "An archiepiscopal see--universities, libraries, and a botanic garden. Shut-in and in-growing meridional culture, tempered by revolutions. By all means let us go to Bogotá, Gipsy!"