But another picture obtruded itself upon this pleasant dream.
Away in the mountains not far from Lake Chuzenji, a green thing had been discovered, a thing that had once been a man. Mac had been to view it at the request of the police, but he could not identify it as the body of the Blind One of the Nikko Road. It was green from the chlorophyll of the cryptomerias. In the quaint language of the Japanese police, it was the body of a man whom “the trees had beaten to death.”
CHAPTER IX
THE HOUSE OF THE CLOUDS
Danjuro, the curio dealer of Jinrikisha Street, Nagasaki (no relation of Danjuro the actor), was a gentleman of uncertain age, with a face which seemed the relic of a thousand years of debauchery.
It was probably only opium, but the awful weary look with which he swindled you, when you were once in the trap he called his shop, would have given Dante points for the construction of a new circle in his Inferno.
He had spent years in China, had Danjuro, hence, perhaps, the expression on his face; also the fact that he did his calculations not by aid of the so-ro-ba, or calculating machine used by the Japanese tradesmen. He did his calculations in his head, and with that far-away look so filled with the poetry of the horrible, he would calculate the difference between the price he had paid for the okimono he was selling you and your offer for it, contrasting them with your own personality, and from these three factors calculating to a nicety how much money he could swindle out of you.
He had a hand in the selling of the Great Tung Jade to the Empress of China, or rather to her ambassador the Mandarin Li, the shadiest transaction that ever emerged from darkness; and could you place end to end the globe trotters swindled and chiseled and fleeced by him, they would reach in a noxious line from London to Newcastle, and maybe further. He had long, polished finger nails that shone like plate glass, and when you entered his establishment he advanced, bowed, and hissed at you by way of welcome.