Then, once more grave, he rose to his feet and fetched from its pedestal a hideous East Indian idol, about six inches high, and placed it in the middle of the Boule table, just opposite Wolf.

“It’s his stomach that makes him so shocking,” said Jason Otter; “but the ways of God aren’t as dainty as those of the Bishop of Salisbury. In this world Truth flies downward, not upward!”

Hardly aware of what he was doing, so occupied was his mind with the whole problem of his host’s personality, Wolf rose, and, leaning over the table, picked up Mukalog, the god of rain. Holding it absentmindedly in his fingers for a while, he finally made a foolish schoolboy-like attempt to balance it upside-down on the flat skull of its monstrous head.