car. Once he said meditatively: "That Appolonius thought of everything! It was so desperately necessary to kill you, Mr. Mannard, that he had even an excuse for calling on you to murder you, though he expected a street-bomb to make it unnecessary! It must be time for his forged check to appear at your bank! That letter was a clever excuse, too. It would throw all suspicion upon the engineers of the mystery of the ancient book."

Mannard grunted. "What's happened where we're going? What sort of changes in the room?" Then he said suspiciously: "No occult stuff?"

"I doubt it very much," said Ghalil. 

There was another car parked in the narrow lane. The police at the house had gotten a doctor, who was evidently still in the building. They went up into the room on the second floor. There were three policemen here, with a grave, mustachioed civilian who had the consequential air of the physician in a European--or Asiatic--country. Duval lay on a canvas cot, evidently provided for the police who occupied the building now. He slept heavily. His face was ravaged. His collar was torn open at his throat, as if in a frenzy of agitation when he felt that madness came upon him. His hands were bandaged. The physician explained at length to Ghalil, in Turkish. Ghalil then asked questions of the police. There was a portable electric lantern on the floor, now. It lighted the room acceptably. 

Coghlan's eyes swept about the place. Changes? No change except the cot.... No! There had been books here beside Duval, on the floor. Ghalil had said they were histories in which Duval tried to find some reference to the building itself. There were still a few of those books--half a dozen, perhaps, out of three or four times as many. The rest had vanished. But in their place were other things. 

Coghlan was staring at them when Ghalil explained: "The police heard him making strange sounds. They came in and he was agitated to incoherence. His hands were frost-bitten. He held the magnet against the appearance of silver and thrust books into it, shouting the while. The books he thrust into the silvery film vanished. He does not speak Turkish, but one of them thought he was shouting at the wall in Greek. They subdued him and brought a physician. He was so agitated that the physician gave him an injection to quiet him." 

Coghlan said: "Damn!" 

He bent over the objects on the floor. There was an ivory stylus and a clumsy reed pen and an ink-pot--the ink was just beginning to thaw from solid ice--and a 

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