He turned to the prayer wheel. Jeanne ceased to listen. “So that is the meaning of the three-bladed knife and the bell,” she was thinking to herself. “How strange! I wonder if the demons flee if the knife is flashed through the air and no bell rings.”
Once more the stream of humanity called. Again she lost herself in that great rushing river. Nor did she emerge until she stood before an immense affair that, seeming a prodigious barrel one hundred and twenty-five feet high, stood out against the night.
As she stepped inside this gigantic barrel her mind went into a tailspin. Had she passed into another world? It seemed so.
The inner walls of that great barrel were all alive. Here she looked deep into the heart of a tropical jungle where giant tractors dragged great mahogany logs through the forest, there a magnificent trans-continental limited leaped at her from the mouth of a tunnel, and here, sailing high over the white vastness of Arctic wilds, a splendid airplane came to rest on an endless expanse of snow.
That it was a trick performed by the miracle of a hundred moving picture projectors she knew right well. Yet it did not destroy for her the sense of illusion.
She stood there lost to the world about her, entranced, when with a sudden shock she felt a hand on her shoulder.
Turning quickly, she found herself looking into the mask-like face of the long-eared Chinaman.
So sudden was the shock that she thought she might fall to the floor or scream.
But she did neither. With the lightning-like movement of a frightened deer, she darted forward. Seeing a door knob, she grasped it. The door opened. Before her was a steel ladder. She was fifty feet up that ladder before she took time to think.
At that instant the door closed. She was in profound darkness. Only far above her shone pale light, a small square of night sky.