Awaking after many hours, Polaris found Kalin standing by his couch.
"Stranger, thou sleepest well. Like an untroubled babe's are thy slumbers," said the priest. "And yet, if I read thee aright, thou art in all ways a strong man. The woman is outdone and sleepeth well. There is that which I would have thee see."
He led him to the edge of the terrace. A little procession of Sardanians was toiling up the path by which they had come. Among them walked a man who was the center of the group, to whom the others, one by one, spoke affectionately, but who answered little. As they came nearer, Polaris saw that he was in the prime of his life and of noble figure; but his limbs were wasted and his face was drawn with lines of suffering.
At the brink of the terrace the group halted. One by one his companions bade the man farewell, lifting their hands in the Sardanian salute. One young woman threw herself, weeping, into his arms, and he kissed her tenderly.
Then the other members of the party took their way down the mountainside again, leading with them the weeping girl. The man came on alone. On the terrace he was received by two of the black-robed attendants of Kalin.
The priest drew Polaris to one side, and they proceeded out of view of the man by a roundabout way to the great stone arch.
"Hither cometh one sore afflicted with illness who would pass the gateway, and thou shalt see him pass," said the priest.
They entered through the arch into the vast cavern beyond, and soon were in darkness, to which, however, the eyes of Kalin seemed to be well accustomed. He led Polaris swiftly through many galleries in the bowels of the mountainside, ever upward, until they reached a broad way, dimly lighted from above, which took a spiral course through the rock. Up the spiral way they passed, and it gave after three or four turns upon a wide, rocky floor, which curved away to either side of where they emerged.
Above them many feet towered the rocky ring of the volcano, of which they were in the crater. Its walls were beetling, scarred with ancient fires, seamed and ragged. Crag upon crag, ledge upon ledge, rose the wall; to where its circle cut a round expanse of blue sky.
All around them the massive rock reverberated to the muffled roar of a great fire far below. Where the shelving rock floor gave into space, clouds of luminous vapors rose from out the mighty pit of the crater. Where the sun's rays beat down through it, far above them, the billowing mass was golden. Directly ahead of them it seethed in a shifting play of colors, now lurid red, now green and yellow and blue, in the reflection cast up from the flickering flames below.