CHAPTER XXI
WHO WAS DOCTOR FENG?
I fancied that I heard my name spoken. My ears were strained—
“Rex! Rex! Listen; can’t you hear?” I seemed to hear faintly afar off.
The voice sounded unusual, like a child’s, weak and high-pitched. Surely I was in a dream.
“Rex! Rex! Listen! Can’t you hear?” the voice continued. It seemed like the shrill voice of a tiny girl.
I listened stupidly: in my lethargy I had not the power to reply.
For a long time I listened, in a sort of delirium, I suppose, but did not hear the voice repeated.
Suddenly, how long afterwards I cannot tell, I distinctly saw Doctor Feng’s face grinning into mine. Upon his white-bearded countenance was a look of exultant triumph. His eyes danced with glee. The sight angered and horrified me. I closed my eyes to shut out the features that seemed to me sinister and mysterious.
A strange sense of oppression, of being deprived of air and of my body being benumbed, overcame me. I could not stir a muscle. In my ears there sounded a strange singing like the song of a thousand birds. At the same time I experienced considerable difficulty in moving, for I seemed to be enveloped in something which, weighing upon my limbs, kept them powerless, as though I were still manacled.
I remember that both my wrists pained me very badly, where the rope had cut into them so cruelly. Then, like a flash, came back a hideous memory of those moments of horror and those darting red tongues of flame. The terror of those moments when I faced a horrible death I now lived over again. I lay appalled.