“I said possessed,” continued Klaw, impressively. “He is some madman with a one idea. His mad brain will have charged the ether”--he waved his long arms right and left--“with mad thoughts. The room of Mr. Pettigrew also will be filled with these grotesque thought-forms. Certainly he is insane, this butcher of mummies. In this case I shall rely, not upon the odic photography, not upon that great science the Cycle of Crime, but upon my library.” None of us, I am sure, entirely understood his meaning; and following a brief silence, during which, in a curiously muffled way, the sounds of the traffic in Wellington Street came to us as we stood there around that modern bier with its 4000-year-old burden, Grimsby asked, with hesitancy: “Don’t you want to make any investigations, Mr. Klaw?” Then Moris Klaw startled us all. “I have a thought!” he cried, loudly. “Name of a dog! I have a thought!” Grabbing his brown bowler, which he had laid on the table beside the headless mummy, “Come, Isis!” he cried, and grasped the girl by the arm. “I have yet another thought, most disturbing! Mr. Searles, would you be so good as also to come?” Wondering greatly whence we were bound and upon what errand, I hastened down the room after them, leaving Inspector Grimsby staring blankly. I think he was rather disappointed with the result of Moris Klaw’s inquiry--if inquiry this hasty visit may be termed. He was disappointed, too, at having spent so short a time in the company of the charming Isis. The middle-aged gentleman came running to let us out. “Good-night, Inspector Grimsby!” called Moris Klaw. “Good-night! good-night, Miss Klaw!” “Good-night, Mr. Someone who has not been introduced!” said Klaw. “My name is Welby,” smiled the other. “Good-night, Mr. Welby!” said Moris Klaw. III During the whole of the journey back to Wapping, Moris Klaw regaled me with anecdotes of travels in the Yucatan Peninsula. I had never met a man before who had ventured fully to explore those deadly swamps; but Moris Klaw chatted about the Izamal temples as unconcernedly as another man might chat about the Paris boulevards. Isis took no part in the conversation, from which I gathered that, although she seemed to accompany her father everywhere, she had not accompanied him into the jungles of Yucatan. “In the heart of those forests, Mr. Searles,” he whispered, “are stranger things than these headless mummies. Do you know that the secret of those great temples buried in the swamps and the jungles and guarded only by serpents and slimy, crawling things, is a door which science has yet to unlock? What people built them, and what god was worshipped in them? Suppose”--he bent to my ear--“I hold the key to that riddle; am I assured to be immortal? Yes? No?” His conversation, although it often seemed to be studiously eccentric, was always that of a man of powerful and unusual mind, a man of vast and unique experience. I was rather sorry when we arrived at our destination.