She assented, and it was then that I recovered from the bewilderment inspired by the unexpected charm of the picture, and realized for the first time what it meant. The bull above the entrance door, the hall, the stair, the marks of heavy hinges at its foot where a gate had hung, the room where the women sat, an atrium, in the old Roman architecture; the garden—by Jove, even the cedars!—the Garden of the Cedars; and the Fountain of the Lion! It was exactly as the first Hugh had described it in the missing half of the Instructions which we had found.
I dug my fingers into Nikka's arm.
"Yes, yes," he said quietly in English. "I see it, too. But do not let yourself seem excited."
Involuntarily I repeated to myself the concluding sentences of the Instructions which we had all memorized:
"From the center of the Fountain take four paces west toward the wall of the atrium. Then walk three paces north. Underfoot is a red stone an ell square."
The center of the Fountain—where could that be? The pool stretched sidewise to us, as we stood in front of the atrium. Plainly, then, it was intended to mean from the center of the pedestal on which the lion was perched. I stepped out from the portico, measured with my eye the distance from the pedestal west toward the wall of the atrium, and walked north on the paved walk which rimmed the central grass-plot.
The flagging here, while naturally worn by the passage of time, was as even as though it had been laid yesterday. It was composed of blocks of red and brown granite in a checker-board pattern, but they seemed to be only a foot square. It was not until I passed the center of the fountain that I discovered that at regular intervals a larger stone was inserted in the design. And sure enough, I found a red one about three and a half paces, as I roughly made it, in a northerly line from the point I had calculated as four paces west of the center of the fountain.
Kara had no eyes for any one save Nikka, and I ventured to stamp my sandaled heel on the stone as I trod over it. It gave back no different sound from those on either side of it, but when my first disappointment had passed, I told myself that this was no more than could have been expected. Had it sounded hollow, surely, some person in the course of seven centuries would have noticed it, and whether possessed of knowledge of the treasure or not, must have had sufficient enterprise to attempt to find what it concealed.
I walked on around the garden, determined to take advantage of this extraordinary opportunity to survey the ground. But there was nothing else to see. On one side the porticos fringed a blank wall, evidently belonging to the adjoining property. Vernon King afterwards said that at some period this group of buildings of the Palace of the Bucoleon had been cut up into separate structures and built together in blocks. On the side toward the Bosphorus a wing of the building we had traversed intervened. Through the frequent windows I saw Gypsy men and women and a few children lounging or occupied with their household duties or playing. One of the men was teaching a boy to pick pockets. I watched him for some time with interest.
I finally abandoned my investigations because I gathered from the tones of their voices that Nikka was having an argument with Kara. When I came up to them, Nikka was offering her Watkins's watch; but she dashed it to the pavement, burst into tears and fled back the way we had come.