“My uncle!” she exclaimed. “How do you know that he is wise—and he is!—and that he is here? Yes, this sun of yours—what is it, where does it come from?”
Again Sajipona laughed.
“Remember,” she said, “this is not Bogota. Out there it is all very wonderful, very great. You have the sky, the sun, the stars. The mountains stretch away as far as the eye can see; there are plains, cities; and there are buildings greater than any we have here. This is a toy world, you will say, even when you think some things in it very wonderful. But you do not guess the half of what is here. In this world my people have lived in secret for centuries. They have discovered things that even the wisest of your people know nothing of. We have eyes that see everything that happens in our world of stone, eyes that pierce through the stones themselves. I knew when you came into our kingdom; I watched you when you passed through the great gate where the others were fighting. But—you don’t believe me. Come, I will show you.”
Sajipona gave her hand to the astonished girl and the two stepped down from the platform where they were standing and made their way to the center of the court. Here the great circle of light cast by the ball of fire overhead gleamed at their feet like an unruffled pool of sun-kissed water. At the rim of this circle they halted, Sajipona gently restraining her companion, who, in her eagerness, would have passed on.
“Look there on the floor,” she said. “Your eyes may not be as ours; perhaps you will have to wait before you can see. But it will come—you will see.”
Una remembered how she had heard—and laughed—of magicians who pretended to read the future by gazing into a crystal globe. The experiment to which she was now invited seemed like that, only here it was apparently a huge mirror of reflected light that she was told to watch, while no word had been said of finding therein a revelation of things to come. Nor could she see anything in this mirror at first. Waves of light, tongues of leaping flame, passed over the polished surface of the metal, here darting off in long zigzag streaks, there forming a sort of pool of molten, quivering fluorescence, as the physicists call it, varying in size and color, then vanishing utterly. Much the same appearance Una remembered having seen on the surface of a copper kettle when subjected to intense heat. But in this case there was no perceptible heat to account for the phenomenon, which was rather electric in its fantastic weavings—a reduplication, on a gigantic scale, of the wavering finger of light that she had watched play, with such fatal results, on her uncle’s electric psychometer. The resemblance, recognized with a shudder, intensified her interest. The succession of marvels through which she had been passing prepared her for anything. In her present mood, nothing would have surprised her.
“What is it? What is it?” she asked eagerly.
Sajipona followed the twisting maze of figures before them with unwonted anxiety. Her usual calm demeanor was gone. She appeared to be reading something the purport of which was not at all to her liking.
“Look!” she exclaimed. “There he is. They have let him pass through the gate. He is coming here. Anitoo’s men are with him.”
To Una the words were meaningless. Yet she knew that her companion was reading, or, rather, witnessing something that was passing before her own eyes, and that hence should have been quite as visible to her—if only she had the clew. But this she did not have. She recognized the hint of danger. She knew that in some way Sajipona had caught a glimpse of some one whom she counted an enemy. She felt that this person was in some way connected with her own party; and then the thought of Raoul Arthur flashed across her mind, at the same time that his veritable image—so it seemed—stood forth in wavering lines of light at her feet.