Prudently he had so placed the Palace that it dominated and threatened with its guns the town, the garden, and the barracks. Any revolt would be the signal for a massacre, from which there would be no escape. The desert formed an insuperable barrier, and anyone who entered that robber's lair must forever renounce all hope of coming out.

For the rest, Blackland was kept perfectly clean, and well maintained, and was provided with every possible commodity. Not a house of the Merry Fellows or the Civil Body which did not have its own telephone. Not a street, not a house,not even a hut in the slaves' quarters, which did not enjoy water from the mains, and which was not lighted by electricity.

Around the city, founded ten years before in sheer desert, the marvels were greater still. Though the sea of sand still surrounded it, this did not now begin for several miles from its wall. In the immediate vicinity of the city, on a tract so great that its limits were hidden beyond the horizon, the desert had given place to fields cultivated by the most efficient methods; here were grown, with ever-increasing success, all the vegetables of Africa and Europe.

Such was the work of Harry Killer, a work which would have been admirable if its basis and purpose had not been crime. But how had he performed it? How had he fertilized these arid and desiccated plains? Water is the one element indispensable to all plant and animal life, for man to live, for the earth to bring forth. How had Harry Killer contrived to bestow it upon this region where whole years had elapsed without a single drop of rain? Was he endowed with a magical power by which he alone could achieve such miracles?

No, Harry Killer possessed no supernatural power; left to his own devices he could never have accomplished such marvels. But Harry Killer was not alone. The Palace, where he lived with those whom he had the effrontery to call his Counsellors, the barracks of the Black Guard, and the heliplane sheds, together occupied only a small part of the last section of Blackland. In the midst of the great open space there were other erections, or rather there was another town contained within the first; its different buildings, with their yards and inner gardens, themselves covered nearly twenty acres. Before the Palace rose the Factory.

The Factory was an independent and autonomous city on which the Chief had lavished wealth, which he respected, which, without admitting it to himself, he even feared a little. If he had devised the town, it was the Factory which had created it, which had equipped it not only with all modern amenities but with astonishing inventions which Europe was not to know until years later.

The Factory had a soul and a body. The soul was its Director. The body comprised about a hundred or so workmen belonging to different nationalities but mostly to France and England, chosen from among the foremost in their respective professions, and transported over a bridge of gold. Each of them received a ministerial salary, and in return he had to submit to the inflexible rule of Blackland.

Almost the whole of this technical body consisted of workmen, of whom skilled mechanics formed the majority. Several were married, so that the Factory contained twenty-seven women, with a few children.

This population of honest workers, who contrasted so strangely with the town's other inhabitants, all lived in the Factory, and from this they were strictly forbidden ever to emerge. Even if they had wanted to, they could not have done so, a careful watch being kept up day and night by the Black Guard and the Merry Fellows. But they had been warned of this when they were engaged, and not one of them felt any temptation to break this rule. In return for the high salary offered them, they had to consider themselves as withdrawn from the world throughout the time they would spend at Black-land. Not only might they never leave the Factory, they could neither write to anyone nor receive any letter from outside.

Though many had recoiled at the stringency of such conditions, several had let themselves be tempted by increases in the promised salary. What had they to lose, after all, when they were poor and had to struggle to earn their daily bread? The chance, of wealth was well worth the disadvantage of facing the unknown; and after all, they reassured themselves, they risked nothing except a little adventure.

The contract signed, it was at once carried out. The new employee embarked on an assigned vessel and this took him to one of the Bissago Islands, an archipelago off the coast of Portuguese Guinea, where he was landed. There he had to agree to be blindfolded, and one of the heliplanes, for which a shelter had been made at a deserted spot on the shore, took him in less than six hours to Blackland, about fourteen hundred miles away as the crow flies. The heliplane landed in the Esplanade between the Palace and the Factory, and the workman, freed from his bandage, entered the latter never to emerge until the time came to terminate his contract and to return to Ins native land.

On this point, indeed, the contract arranged for the employee to be repatriated. If he were a prisoner so long as he remained in Blackland, he had the option at any time of leaving the town for ever. Then another heliplane would take him from the Esplanade and fly him to the Bissago Islands, where he would find a steamer to take him to Europe.

Such, at any rate, was the assurance given to the workmen who wished to leave. What their comrades in the Factory did not know, however, was that those who left in this way never arrived at their destination, that their bones were bleaching somewhere in the desert, that their salaries were invariably reclaimed by those who paid them. Thus the city's cash box never became empty, thus was kept secret the existence of Blackland, and thus the empire of Harry Killer remained unknown.

None the less departures were rare.