There he was, abandoned by his nurse to the horrors of the big black bedroom. Then it arose from the shallows of the deeper darkness, the black phantom of his baby-fears. The darkness was within, for his eyes were closed and he did not look upon any physical manifestation.

An immense cone lay before his closed eyes, from the apex of which rose a huge grinning face, advancing toward him from the unfathomable inner distance. It came on gradually but unavoidably.

No, no, standoff, you terror! Mister Gilchrist, it is upon me—help!

But on it came, the disembodied head of some damned pagan magician, whose body had been consigned to the flames, but his head spared to haunt the still living. He struggled within his tiny child’s body—no, the ailing body of a convalescent man—to squirm away from the encroaching horror.

But on it came.

Soon its monstrous subhuman features and deep penetrating eyes were so close that he could feel their negative energy with every pore and whisker that covered his own helpless, immoveable face.

What to do? Shall this be my price for not fully believing in the God of Man’s own arrogant self-image? Is this my Hades glimpsed only when I near the Bank of the Styx?

Then, abruptly, and without warning, as was always the case for this particular terror—except one supposes when the actual time for damnation is upon you, you Gypsy charlatan—the monstrous face started back to the apex of the cone, receding from his inner sight to a deeper quarter than it had emerged, until only the dark eyes were left bobbing in the abyss, waiting as always, to return and haunt him unless he pulled himself away from the black bedroom of boyhood…

Awaken Gypsy, awaken to the world of a failed man’s pain or you are lost to the terrors of your inner child.

From the swirling mists of the shallows of night, he awoke swaying in his hammock, on the deck of this wretched Uruguayan steamer, to the clap of a tackle block and the melancholy thrum of the engine. True night had fallen, the last hope of the plunging sun a memory for more than minutes. His gypsy sense was piqued. But with the will of the true mesmerist—who must mesmerize himself, first and foremost—Captain Richard Francis Burton willed himself back into the shadows of the mind. For one who would abandon the cause of his health and stay Her Majesty's hand on his heart to adventure across the face of a fickle world must husband his resources when he may.

For how long he slumbered in this forced manner, he could only guess, for Time left him in such a state. But the call, the call of that vilifying voice, last heard under a Brazilian Army tent, called to him across the placid gulf constructed by his mind for its own restful tomb, "Dick. Dick! Dick!!—you heathen rogue. Dick!"

He started awake, the cold claws of an icy hand creeping down his neck from the base of his violated brain, the voice of a kindred, mortal foe having been unwittingly invited thence by his own heretic entrancement. As he hung asway in his hammock his dark eyes were drawn across the nighted bay as the steamer chugged on, splashing obscenely were more graceful craft once cut the sea in a better, more studied, way.