But Margrave’s keen eye caught sight of the atoms upcast by the light of the moon. He exclaimed to me, “Found! I shall live!” And then, as he gathered up the grains with tremulous hands, he called out to the Veiled Woman, hitherto still seated motionless on the crag. At his word she rose and went to the place hard by, where the fuel was piled, busying herself there. I had no leisure to heed her. I continued my search in the soft and yielding soil that time and the decay of vegetable life had accumulated over the Pre-Adamite strata on which the arch of the cave rested its mighty keystone.
When we had collected of these particles about thrice as much as a man might hold in his hand, we seemed to have exhausted their bed. We continued still to find gold, but no more of the delicate substance, to which, in our sight, gold was as dross.
“Enough,” then said Margrave, reluctantly desisting. “What we have gained already will suffice for a life thrice as long as legend attributes to Haroun. I shall live,—I shall live through the centuries.”
“Forget not that I claim my share.”
“Your share—yours! True—your half of my life! It is true.” He paused with a low, ironical, malignant laugh; and then added, as he rose and turned away, “But the work is yet to be done.”
CHAPTER LXXXIV.
While we had thus laboured and found, Ayesha had placed the fuel where the moonlight fell fullest on the sward of the tableland,—a part of it already piled as for a fire, the rest of it heaped confusedly close at hand; and by the pile she had placed the coffer. And there she stood, her arms folded under her mantle, her dark image seeming darker still as the moonlight whitened all the ground from which the image rose motionless. Margrave opened his coffer, the Veiled Woman did not aid him, and I watched in silence, while he as silently made his weird and wizard-like preparations.