THE GREAT DIVIDE Durkin waited until, muffled and far away, the throb and drone of an orchestra floated up to him.

This was followed, scatteringly, by the bells of the different _tables d'hote_.

They, too, sounded thin and remote, drifting up through the soft, warm air that had always seemed so exotic to him, so redolent of foreign-odored flowers, so burdened with alien-smelling tobacco smoke, of unfamiliar sea scents incongruously shot through with even the fumes of an unknown and indescribable cookery.
While that genial shrill and tinkle of many bells meant refreshment and most gregarious frivolity for the chattering, loitering, laughing and ever-spectacular groups so far below him--and how he hated their outlandish gibberish and their arrogant European aloofness!--it meant for him hard work, and hard work of a somewhat perilous and stimulating nature.
For, as the last of the demurely noisy groups made their way through the deepening twilight to the different hotels and cafes that already spangled the hillsides with scattering clusters of light, Durkin coolly removed his shoes, twisted and knotted his two bath towels into a stout rope, securely tied back his heavy French window-shutter of wood with one of his sheets, and having attached his improvised rope to the base of the shutters, swung himself deftly out.

On the return swing he caught the cast-iron water-pipe that scaled the wall from window tier to window tier.

Down this jointed pipe he went, gorilla-like, segment by segment, until he reached what he knew to be the hotel's third floor.