Treasure of Triton

The Space Patrol and the terrible guards of Triton pursued Wolf Larsen. But the black pirate had two aces in the hole—creation's richest prize, and a ray-death route to freedom.
Triton was a dead world. The hydrogen snow that covered the illimitable desolation of the plain glowed a weird green in the dying Neptune-light. Above it, grim and black, towered the west wall of the great Temple of Triton. The evening gale had drifted the snow high against its east wall, but here, in its lee, the ground was bare. The faint light struck sparks of color from the gravel, the stones, the boulders—gravel that was ruby and sapphire, stones that were giant moissonites, boulders that were titanic diamonds. The Wolf Cub rested on that gravel, its beryllium sides a sickly green. In all that world, only Wolf Larsen lived and moved and breathed.
An alien might have correctly supposed that this world had been dead for untold ages, that the builders of its Temple had perished incalculably long ago, that nothing would ever live here again. Wolf Larsen knew better. In a few hours, it would be dawn, and the strange life of Triton would revive. That was the reason for his haste.
The job had taken longer than he had expected. The Temple was built of cyclopean blocks of bort—black diamond, the hardest of all substances. The life-span of a Tritonian is ten times that of a human, but no one would ever know how many generations it had taken the Tritonians, with their primitive technique, to hew those innumerable blocks. Nor did the Tritonians themselves know for how long they had worshiped at that fane. Most authorities agreed that it must have been old before the Pyramids of Egypt were begun.
The Temple was windowless, and had only one door, some six feet square. Set in the middle of the west face, it was hewn from a single gigantic block of bort. With that door, Larsen had been struggling ever since the evening gale died down. It had proved harder to blast a hole through the bort than he had anticipated. And its thickness had amazed him. He had been unable to get at its lock; if, indeed, it had a lock. In fact, he might as well have tried to blast through the wall itself.