CHAPTER VIII
Lord Peter reached home about midnight, feeling extraordinarily wakeful and alert. Something was jigging and worrying in his brain; it felt like a hive of bees, stirred up by a stick. He felt as though he were looking at a complicated riddle, of which he had once been told the answer but had forgotten it and was always on the point of remembering.
“Somewhere,” said Lord Peter to himself, “somewhere I’ve got the key to these two things. I know I’ve got it, only I can’t remember what it is. Somebody said it. Perhaps I said it. I can’t remember where, but I know I’ve got it. Go to bed, Bunter, I shall sit up a little. I’ll just slip on a dressing-gown.”
Before the fire he sat down with his pipe in his mouth and his jazz-coloured peacocks gathered about him. He traced out this line and that line of investigation—rivers running into the sand. They ran out from the thought of Levy, last seen at ten o’clock in Prince of Wales Road. They ran back from the picture of the grotesque dead man in Mr. Thipps’s bathroom—they ran over the roof, and were lost—lost in the sand. Rivers running into the sand—rivers running underground, very far down—
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
By leaning his head down, it seemed to Lord Peter that he could hear them, very faintly, lipping and gurgling somewhere in the darkness. But where? He felt quite sure that somebody had told him once, only he had forgotten.
He roused himself, threw a log on the fire, and picked up a book which the indefatigable Bunter, carrying on his daily fatigues amid the excitements of special duty, had brought from the Times Book Club. It happened to be Sir Julian Freke’s “Physiological Bases of the Conscience,” which he had seen reviewed two days before.