“Piece of stone,” said the lad, dragging out a rounded fragment.
“Piece of stone! Yes, boy, but it is a portion of a broken statue—the folds of a robe.”
“Humph!” muttered the old lawyer. “Might be anything. Not going to carry it away I suppose?”
“That depends,” said the professor labouring away.
“Humph!” ejaculated Mr Burne.
“How is it that such a grand city as this should have been so completely destroyed, Mr Preston?” asked Lawrence.
“It is impossible to say. It may have been by the ravages of fire. More likely by war. The nation here may have been very powerful, and a more powerful nation attacked them, and, perhaps after a long siege, the soldiery utterly destroyed it, while the ravages of a couple of thousand years, perhaps of three thousand, gave the finishing touches to the destruction, and—ah, here is another piece of the same statue.”
He dragged out with great difficulty another fragment of marble which had plainly enough been carved to represent drapery, and he was scraping carefully from it some adhering fragments of earth, when Mr Burne suddenly leaped up from the block of stone upon which he had been perched, and began to shake his trousers and slap and bang his legs for a time, and then limped up and down rubbing his calf, and muttering angrily.
“What is the matter, Mr Burne?” cried Lawrence.
“Matter, sir! I’ve been bitten by one of those horrible vipers. The brute must have crawled up my leg and—I say, Yussuf, am I a dead man?”