"A pleasure city!" I gasped. "A Pleasure City in the Clouds!"
"On two stages right up at the very summit, suspended by a system of cantilevers of the most intricate modern construction and of toughened steel. I understand that a triangle measuring in all four acres will support a marvelous series of palaces, a Lhassa of the air!"
"Why Lhassa, Mr. Rolston?"
"Because," he replied, "it's to be a Forbidden City, which no one will be allowed to penetrate or see. It is a marvelous conception only possible to enormous wealth and the vision of a superman."
I left my chair and began pacing up and down the room as the freakish grandeur of the conception burst fully upon me. Towering over London, dwarfing Saint Paul's to a child's toy, a City in the Clouds!
I stopped suddenly, wheeled round and shouted: "But who, Mr. Rolston, is the madman, genius or superman who has imagined this and actually carried it out in sober twentieth-century England?"
"That's the greatest secret of all," he said, looking round the room as if frightened.
Then he slid from his chair and was at my side in a moment.
"It's a Mr. Gideon Mendoza Morse from Brazil," he whispered.