Smith walked ahead of me upstairs; he had snapped up the light in the hallway, and now
he turned and cried back loudly:
"I fear we should never get servants to stay here."
Again I detected the appeal to a hidden Audience; and there was something very uncanny
in the idea. The house now was deathly still; the ringing had entirely subsided. In the
upper corridor my companion, who seemed to be well acquainted with the position of the
switches, again turned up all the lights, and in pursuit of the strange comedy which he
saw fit to enact, addressed me continuously in the loud and unnatural voice which he had
adopted as part of his disguise.
We looked into a number of rooms all well and comfortably furnished, but although my
imagination may have been responsible for the idea, they all seemed to possess a chilly
and repellent atmosphere. I felt that to essay sleep in any one of them would be the
merest farce, that the place to all intents and purposes was uninhabitable, that something
incalculably evil presided over the house.
And through it all, so obtuse was I, that no glimmer of the truth entered my mind. Outside
again in the long, brightly lighted corridor, we stood for a moment as if a mutual
anticipation of some new event pending had come to us. It was curious that sudden
pulling up and silent questioning of one another; because, although we acted thus, no
sound had reached us. A few seconds later our anticipation was realized. From the
direction of the stairs it came--a low wailing in a woman's voice; and the sweetness of the
tones added to the terror of the sound. I clutched at Smith's arm convulsively whilst that
uncanny cry rose and fell--rose and fell--and died away.
Neither of us moved immediately. My mind was working with feverish rapidity and
seeking to run down a memory which the sound had stirred into faint quickness. My heart
was still leaping wildly when the wailing began again, rising and falling in regular
cadence. At that instant I identified it.
During the time Smith and I had spent together in Egypt, two years before, searching for
Karamaneh, I had found myself on one occasion in the neighborhood of a native
cemetery near to Bedrasheen. Now, the scene which I had witnessed there rose up again
vividly before me, and I seemed to see a little group of black-robed women clustered
together about a native grave; for the wailing which now was dying away again in the
Gables was the same, or almost the same, as the wailing of those Egyptian mourners.
The house was very silent again, now. My forehead was damp with perspiration, and I
became more and more convinced that the uncanny ordeal must prove too much for my
nerves. Hitherto, I had accorded little credence to tales of the supernatural, but face to
face with such manifestations as these, I realized that I would have faced rather a group
