"One leaf of the door opened and remained so for a second before a head appeared, a head of grey, upstanding hair and a dark, bushy beard. You don't often meet with doors that open in that fashion at home. You know the English fashion--six inches and a face peering at you suspiciously, or a wide fling open and the servant standing right up to you and blocking the way with a paralyzing stare. On the continent there is the porter below and the door opens to let you in, not just to see what you want. So in I walked, the door closed and I found myself in the ante-room of Doctor West's apartment, faced by Doctor West himself, and watched by a mummy-case standing close to the wall, a mummy-case painted with a strange, anxious face. Its gold eyes had luminous whites and strong black brows. That bizarre curiosity was the key of the Doctor's furnishing scheme, and it had for me another significance. I knew then that I had heard of him with some certainty. I connected him at last with various stories I had vaguely picked up, snatches of conversation on the bridge-deck or in the mess-room. I recalled the Chief telling me once of some doctor who had come, years ago, to stay at some hotel and who had never left it since except to spend a month every year in Egypt. Great student of mummies, the Chief said. Yes, I remembered it all. Perhaps, if I had not had Rosa, I might have fastened more securely to the story in the first place. Now Rosa had brought me to him. I told him who I was. He nodded and showed me into his front room.
"It is difficult to convey the sense of overwhelming vastness which oppresses men in such chambers. You might not feel it so. My quarters are limited, as you may imagine. Even a millionaire-passenger gets no more than a cottager ashore. And Rebecca's place had small rooms full of plush furniture and ship-models in bottles and catamarans in glass-cases, assegais and Japanese junk. Ugly and comfortable. But this room of Doctor West's was terrifying to me. I couldn't see the ceiling at all save that, just above where his reading lamp glowed green on an immense table, there floated some far-off drapery and a plunging knee--a fresco lost in the gloom. The walls were painted, on stucco, into panels and each panel had a bunch of flowers tied with interminable ribbons in the centre. You don't like that sort of thing? Well, it is indigenous there, anyway, and you can't put shiny dadoes and humorous borders on a forty-foot wall, can you?