When smothering the crafty-looking old gentleman, she had smothered them all--fundamentally." Felicie shook her head, saying: "That does not apply to this case." She meant to say that her own phantom was not a grotesque old man, on whom one could sit, but a jealous dead man who did not pay her visits without some object.

But she feared to speak of these things; and, letting her hands fall upon her knees, she held her peace.
Seeing her thus, dejected and crushed, he pointed out that these disorders of the vision were neither rare nor very serious, and that they soon vanished without leaving any traces.
"I myself," he said, "once had a vision." "You ?" "Yes, I had a vision, some twenty years ago.

It was in Egypt." He noticed that she was looking at him inquiringly, so he began the story of his hallucination, having switched on all the electric lights, in order to disperse the phantoms of darkness.
"In the days when I was practising in Cairo, I was accustomed, in the February of each year, to go up the Nile as far as Luxor, and thence I proceeded, in company with some friends, to visit the tombs and temples in the desert.

These trips across the sands are made on donkey-back.

The last time I went to Luxor I hired a young donkey-boy, whose white donkey Rameses was stronger than the others.