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did as he suggested. As the lamplight fell on the stone, a strange phenomenon took place: the red glow at the heart of it seemed to swirl and part like smoke, to reveal a series of ledges and chasms—a fantastic landscape of gorges, peaks, and terrifying abysses whose depth was impossible to plumb. Only once have I read of such a landscape, and that was in a work on the delusions and horrors of opium addiction.
    The effect of this extraordinary sight was what the ma-

    harajah had predicted. I swayed, suddenly struck by the most dizzying vertigo. Captain Lockhart caught my arm, and the maharajah took back the stone, laughing. The incident was passed off with a joke.
    Our visit ended shortly afterward. I did not see the maharajah again for a year or so, and then only in the course of the horrible event which forms the climax of this narrative— an event which has brought me more shame and unhappiness than I would have imagined possible. May God (if there is a God, and not an infinity of mocking demons) grant me oblivion and forgetfulness, and may it come soon!
    The year which passed after I first saw the stone was a time of omens and portents—signs of the terrible storm which was about to break over us in the mutiny, and signs which, to a man, we failed to read. On the horrors and savagery of the mutiny itself it is not my present concern to dwell. Others more eloquent than I have told the story of this time, with its deeds of heroism shining like beacons amid scenes of hideous carnage; it is enough to say that, while hundreds did not survive, I did—and so did three others in whose destiny the ruby continues to play a large and commanding part.
    I pass on now to a time during the Siege of Lucknow, not long before its relief.
    My regiment was garrisoned in the city, and ...
    Sally looked up. The train had drawn into a station; she saw a sign that read CHATHAM. She shut the book, her head fiilled with strange images: a golden banquet, hideous deaths, and a stone that intoxicated like opium. . . . "Three others" had survived, said the Major; her father and herself, she thought at once. And the third?
    She opened the book again—only to shut it hastily as the carriage door opened and a man got in.

    He was jauntily dressed in a bright, checkered suit, with a gaudy pin in his cravat. He lifted his bowler hat to Sally before sitting down.
    "Afternoon, miss," he said.
    "Good afternoon."
    She looked away, out of the opposite window. She did not want conversation, and there was something about this man's familiar smile she did not like. Girls of Sally's class did not travel alone; it looked odd and invited the wrong kind of attention.
    The train steamed out of the station, and the man took out a packet of sandwiches and started to eat. He took no more notice of her. She sat still, gazing out at the marshes, the city in the distance, and the masts of ships in the docks and shipyards far off to the right.
    Time passed. Eventually the train drew in at London Bridge Station, under the dark, smoky canopy of glass, and the sound of the engine changed as the steam hissed and echoed amid the calls of the porters and the clanging of the jolting carriages. Sally sat up and rubbed her eyes. She had fallen asleep.
    The door of the compartment was swinging open.
    The man had gone, and so had the book. He had stolen it and vanished.

    The Ceremony of the Smoke
    She leaped up in alarm and sprang to the door. But the platform was crowded, and the only things she remembered about the man were his checkered suit and bowler hat—and there were dozens of those in sight....
    A wave of despair passed over her. To lose that book— her own past was in those pages! It was the key to everything. ...
    She turned back to the compartment. Her bag lay in the corner where she had sat. She bent to pick it up and then noticed, on the floor under the edge of the seat, a few sheets of paper.
    The book had been loosely bound; these pages must have fallen out and