“A moment later, Chang-Fu ushered in the conjurer, and discreetly vanished. It was indeed the man we had seen at the café--more than that, I recognized him suddenly, being now without his hat, as the man hanging round that deserted temple. The ingratiating leer which twisted up his emaciated face did not render it less ugly. With a profound bow he advanced fawningly toward us, bowed again and then withdrew, after a word or two in dialect which I did not understand but to which the captain replied in a monosyllable, to a little distance across the saloon floor. “He performed one or two clever but not particularly remarkable tricks, all of them harmless enough, and my vague suspicions of mischief were lulled gradually in the interest with which I watched him. Captain Strong remained silent, expressionless. I noticed that it was toward him that the conjurer directed his smiles, and his attention that he endeavoured more especially to hold. His complete immobility made it impossible to guess the effect of the conjurer’s manœuvres; certainly he did not take his eyes from him for a single moment and his right hand remained in the pocket where I knew the revolver to be. “Presently the conjurer produced a large bronze bowl--apparently from nowhere--and made the usual mystic passes in the air above it. Smoke began to issue from the bowl, a thick dark smoke which filled the saloon with a pervasive and subtly pleasant aromatic scent. The smoke rose from the bowl in ever denser volumes, curling into the air under the saloon roof in such masses as to obscure our vision of the farther walls. The electric lamps glowed redly as through a fog. The sweet, cloying smell of incense permeated the atmosphere, made it oppressive, dulled the brain as I drew it with every breath into my lungs. An insidious paralysis stole over me. I felt that I had no power over my limbs, could not move a muscle. I could only stare fascinated at that grotesquely ugly Oriental half-seen in the dim light amid the wreathing fumes, his skeleton-like hands still sweeping in slow and regular passes over the bowl. I heard the deep breathing of Captain Strong at my side as of a person whose individuality was remote from mine, hardly to be identified. My drugged brain registered only that he was as motionless as I.