42
A strong, overpowering smell of white heliotrope first greeted my nostrils.
"It was a most peculiar room, the walls of which were covered over with some warm, white, soft, quilted stuff, studded all over with frosted silver buttons; the floor was covered with the curly white fleece of young lambs; in the middle of the apartment stood a capacious couch, on which was thrown the skin of a huge polar bear. Over this single piece of furniture, an old silver lamp—evidently from some Byzantine church or some Eastern synagogue—-shed a pale glimmering light, sufficient, however, to light up the dazzling whiteness of this temple of Priapus whose votaries we were.
"'I know,' said he, as he dragged me in, 'I know that white is your favourite colour, that it suits your dark complexion, so it has been fitted up for you and you alone. No other mortal shall ever set his foot in it.'
"Uttering these words, he in a trice stripped me deftly of all my clothes—for I was in his hands like a slumbering child, or a man in a trance.
