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“You will observe,” he said, “that when I am weary of exertion and return to my house, I descend. In the old type of house it was customary to ascend.”

I should calculate that we descended some thirty-five or forty feet below the surface. At this point we were confronted by a perfectly ordinary door with a brass knocker on it and an electric light above it. On the door were painted the letters and figures MZ04. He opened the door with a small latchkey, which he produced from one of his boots. The keyhole and the handle were placed at such a height that it was easy for him to reach them without assuming the erect position. We went through into a small hall, brightly lit and containing no furniture but a door-mat, on which my guide wiped his four boots carefully. He then requested me to come with him into the dining-room, as indeed I was by no means reluctant to do.

On entering this room, however, I was disappointed, for it bore no resemblance whatever to a dining-room, and there was no look of good cheer about it. Its walls were lined with shelves, and the shelves were filled with numbered bottles containing what looked like small pills. In the middle of the room, immediately under the light, was a low table, on which were a row of small aluminium cups and a leather-bound book. There was no other furniture of any description.

“You are looking for a chair perhaps,” said my host presently. “We have none. To stand erect on the feet is a precarious position, and to sit is hardly less precarious. We avoid all risk. On all fours or in a recumbent position one is safe. However, if you would like to sit on the floor, pray do so, while I make up the prescription which you require.”

I sat down on the floor, which was very hard and discouraging. I did not greatly like that use of the word “prescription,” and my inner man cried rather for butcher’s meat than for chemist’s stuff. However, a man must take his adventures as he finds them.

My guide slipped his hands out of his boots and consulted the volume on the table. “From long use,” he said meditatively, “I know most of the numbers by heart; but I cannot recall what is taken for a chill caused by prolonged submersion in sea-water. I have never had occasion to use it. Ah, here we are! Number one hundred and one.”

He took down the bottle which bore that number, and dropped one pill from it into an aluminium cup. I noticed that the shelves were all placed low on the wall. But indeed the whole of the appointments and furniture of the house was adapted for beings who used the quadrupedal position. I noticed, moreover, both now and afterwards, what very little furniture there was in these houses. The hatred of superfluity was a marked characteristic of the people of Thule.

My host took down one bottle after another from the shelves, talking as he did so. Each bottle had an ingenious stopper, which allowed one pill, and only one, to fall out each time that the bottle was reversed.

“I have never eaten shark, cooked or uncooked,” said my host, “but I should imagine that a diet confined to this meat would give an excess of nitrogen. We correct that with one of number eighteen. To this I add our ordinary repast–numbers one, two, and three–a corrective for exhaustion from number sixty-four, and a pill of a narcotic character from sixty-eight.”

He handed me the little aluminium cup with the pills in it. “I think,” he said, “that is all you require.”

“I am extremely thirsty,” I said.

“No civilised man eats and drinks at the same time.” He whisked down another bottle and dropped one more pill into my cup. “You will find,” he said, “that little addition will remove all sensation of thirst. You shall drink when the right time comes.”