I quickened my pace, reached the door that led into the main hall and softly opened it, sticking my head cautiously around the corner. The big hall, with its vivid and somewhat indelicate paintings, was deserted also, and the lights were turned low, as I remembered them last. The last man into the big hall closed the door behind him. “The banquet room is there,” I whispered, pointing it out to the Chief. “And the room of the voices is beyond there. That’s the blind corridor I told you about,” I added, pointing toward the far corner of the hall. “I think the others are sleeping-rooms.” The Chief stepped silently around the center table and down the hall, with us close behind him. He laid hold of the big doors into the banqueting hall. As he did so, a small door opened behind us, and I turned in time to catch sight of a startled Chinese face peering around the door which led into the blind corridor where I had talked with Margaret. Before I could make any sign the face disappeared. The next instant the lights went out and we were in complete darkness. Then the Chief flung open the big doors, and we surged forward. But the Chief and his men halted on the threshold, staring in momentary amazement at the strange scene before them. And I too drew up and stared over their shoulders, for I could not believe at first that this was the same room in which I had dined only the night before. The pillars, running around the room and forming a sort of corridor on all four sides of it, were still there. But instead of being apparently solid as I remembered them, they now seemed to be formed of some semi-transparent material, through which bright lights in their interiors made a brilliant but diffused glow in the room. Otherwise the place was entirely changed. The big open space enclosed by the pillars, and which had formerly held the divans, had now been converted in some way into a shallow lake. In the middle of this lake floated a huge and really wonderful reproduction of an Egyptian royal barge at anchor. The water was only a couple of feet deep and servants, waiting on the diners on the barge, were wading back and forth between the barge and the corridor formed by the pillars. Even the skin of these men had been browned and they were clad in loin-cloths only.