In Grand Square it was clearing up with a vengeance. There were gleams of sunlight here and there and the mist had lifted for about twelve feet above my head. I saw him bolt round the central fountain, hidden by an immense bronze dragon for a moment, and then legging it for all he was worth towards the way that led to the lifts for the second stage. The wood floor had dried with the lifting of the mist and I was doing seven-foot strides. I was seeing red. There was a terrible cold fury at the bottom of my heart, but in my mind there was a furious joy. With every stride I gained on him--this powerful, thick-set, baboon-like man from the forests of the Amazon. I gave a loud, exulting "View-halloo," and the black head turned for an instant--he lost ten good yards by that. I whooped again. I meant to kill, to rend him in pieces. And for the first time in my life I realized the joy of primeval man: the lust of the hunt, red fang, red claw, to tear, dominate and destroy. Oh, it was fine hunting! Damn him! He snapped himself into one of the little lifts when I was within six yards of him. I saw his ugly face sink out of sight behind the glass panels. I remembered that these small hydraulic lifts worked, though the big ones below didn't. But I remembered something else ... there was a stairway. I found it by instinct, a great broad stair with tiled walls like the subway of some railway terminus. I didn't bother about the stairs. I leapt down--preserving my balance by a miracle--six or seven at a time. Pounding out into the great empty City at the foot, I swirled round and was just in time to see my gentleman bolt out of his lift like a rabbit from its hole and run to where I knew was the outside stairway which fell, in its corkscrew path, barred by many gates, right down to safety and the normal world. It was the way by which dear old Pu-Yi had hoped to descend and raise the alarm. It was the perilous eyrie upon which this same bull-like assassin had picked him off like a sitting pigeon and boasted of it not half an hour before. As he dodged and ran I fired at him, but never a bullet touched the brute and I flung the Colt away with an oath. "Much better kill him with my own hands," I said in my mind, "much better tear his head off, break him up--" I tell you this as it happened. For the moment I was a wild beast, in pursuit of another, but still, I think, a super-beast. Well, never mind that. I saw him fumbling at a sort of fence, clearly outlined against an immense space of morning sky, and thundered after him--thundered, I say, because I was now running along an open steel grating, which seemed to sway.... Then I vaulted over where Zorilla had vaulted, and my heart leapt into my mouth as I fell--fell some eight feet on to a tiny platform, protected from space by a rail not more than three feet high.