Chapter Thirty One
The Samurai’s Sword
The muffled drumming of sleepless Paris seemed very remote from us as, side by side we crept up the narrow path to the studio that was our objective. This was a starry but moonless night, and the little dingy white building with a solitary tree peeping, in silhouette above its glazed roof, bore an odd resemblance to one of those tombs which form a city of the dead so near to the city of feverish life, on the slopes of the Mokattam Hills.
The star-jewelled sky, was strongly suggestive – and fittingly so - of an Eastern night and gave up no sign to show that it masked the presence of more than twenty men.
Some distance away on our right was Les Pignons, the sinister and deserted mansion which we assumed, and with good reason, to be nothing less than
