The Winding Stair

It was the sixteenth day of April in the following year. The dawn broke over Fez sullen and unfriendly as the mood of the city. And all through the morning the clouds grew heavi...

Si El Hadj Arrifa was right. When Mohammed saw Paul Ravenel ride forward out of the loom of the night into the darkness of the tunnel, bending his head so that it might not stri...

That day, the eighteenth of April, broke in gloom. A heavy canopy of sullen clouds hung over Fez. Nowhere within eye’s reach was there a slant of sunshine. There were no shadows...

The rumours of the camp were proved true the next morning and the preparations for provisioning and concentrating so large a force were swiftly pushed forward. Gerard de Montign...

On the twenty-first of April, three days later, Gerard de Montignac rode into Fez at ten o’clock of the morning behind General Moinier. He was lodged at the Auvert Hospital and...

It was six o’clock on a Friday afternoon and a pleasant rustle of the plane trees in the square came through the open window of the office. Mr. Ferguson thought of his cool gard...

Gerard de Montignac had never been so thoroughly startled and surprised in his life. But he was angrily conscious of an emotion far keener than his surprise. He was jealous. Jea...

It was very near to the dawn now. There was a freshness and an expectation in the air; a faint colourless light was invading the darkness; in the patch of sky above their heads...

“There’s not the slightest reason for alarm,” Gerard de Montignac declared testily in much the same tone which Colonel Vanderfelt was using to his wife nearly two thousand miles...

“Ferguson wrote to me that you mean to return to your own race,” said Colonel Vanderfelt, when the ladies had withdrawn from the dining room. He was a small, wiry man, dark of c...

“You were civil to me when your friend would have sent me contemptuously away,” she said. “And when I told you that I had dined at the Café de Paris only three weeks ago, and yo...

The sharp lesson, then the goodwill; and always even during the infliction of the lesson, fair dealing between man and man, and nothing taken without payment on the spot. This,...

Paul Ravenel reported to the General and then betook himself to the house by the sea-wall in which he had spent so much of his boyhood. He had a month’s furlough and an account...

Marguerite drove her two trembling negresses out of the corners into which they had flown when the house was invaded, stood over them while they cooked the dinner, and strictly...

In the summer of that same year, the thundercloud burst over Europe, and France, at her moment of need, reaped the fine harvest of her colonial policy. Black men and brown muste...

Gradually the attack upon the Consulates died away. The waving light from the blaze of torches in the ring of streets about that quarter diminished, and darkness came again to t...

When they reached the wide doorway they slipped out onto the balcony. It was cool here and quiet and there was no light except that which came from the Bar. They sat down at a t...

What had happened between the moment when Gerard de Montignac rode away from the door of Si Tayeb Reha’s house the first time and the moment when the pistol-shot rang out? It ha...

The longer the silence grew, the more difficult Gerard de Montignac felt it was to break. He had entered the room, clothed upon with authority, sensible of it and prepared to de...

Though Paul left Mr. Ferguson’s office with a calm enough face, his mind was bewildered and fear clutched at his heart. Things were happening to him which he had never imagined...

Si El Hadj Arrifa squatted upon his cushions and stared at the flames of the candles in his branched silver candlestick. Captain Paul Ravenel would be half way through the Tala...

Paul Ravenel left Colonel Vanderfelt’s house of King’s Corner on the next morning in time to catch an early train to London. His friends gathered in the drive to wave him a good...

Gerard de Montignac found Paul still up and putting the last words to the report of long and solitary wanderings amongst the inland tribes. The report was to be despatched the n...