It seemed to me that the tall greyhead, who had joined us, started slightly at the name. He was scanning our faces with a curious intentness. Poyning spoke to him, whereupon he took on for the first time a faint flicker of a smile, and answered my companion with words in which I caught a note of sympathy; then his features resumed their stern, statuesque calm, and he reminded me of nothing so forcibly as some beautiful Grecian marble in a gallery. 'Whatever the reason is,' I whispered, 'they seem to be vastly taken with him. You weren't here when they found his body. Poyning, every man jack of them plunked down on to his face!' He gave me a queer look. 'I wonder,' he said, slowly, 'whether Philipson knew more about this place than he ever told us? Supposing, for instance, he had ever been here before--' I instinctively turned my eyes towards the spot where Philipson lay. Although we weren't allowed to approach, no attempt was made to prevent us from looking at what was going on; and as we were barely twenty yards away, I can vouch pretty confidently for what I saw. The physicians had laid their case of salves and bandages on a cloth on the wet ground, and had placed against each of Philipson's wrists a cubical box in dark wood, about the size of a studio camera. The notion that at once occurred to me was some form of electric battery, but later I had reason to believe that explanation fell very far short of the truth. A moment's reflection would have told me this now, for no sound came from the boxes, and no application of the crude material force we call electricity could have caused our comrade to revive as he now did. His limbs were stirring, and I distinctly saw his lips move. The physicians detached the boxes and replaced them in one of the larger caskets. They were talking to Philipson now, and _he was answering them, with perfect fluency, in the language of this valley_. At last the physicians rose to their feet, made a profound genuflexion, and beckoned to the bearers of a sumptuous litter, who had come up the hillside towards them. Two other litters bore the dead bodies of Ah Sing and Lo Eng, and a fourth I was given myself, since with an ankle like mine I could hardly hope to complete the long tramp down into the city on foot. Philipson's litter travelled well ahead of us, and I saw that a bodyguard had at once formed round it.