Summoning up all his courage, Hugh threw open the adamant door
After a while, I am glad to tell you, he even ceased turning around now and then to see if he were being followed by the whiskeroarer or the vrish.
Presently Hugh began to hear the queerest tinkling-clinking ringing sound, unbroken in its flow as the trilling of a stream. A moment later the youth opened a second pointed door and stood in a lighted chamber, staring at a fountain of money.
The chamber was high and square; its roof and walls were of blackest adamant, twinkly-bright with specks of yellow gold, and a magic, ever-burning lamp of adamant hung from above, yielding a golden light. In the height of the further wall a great fountain-like opening there was, framed in a golden star, and through this there poured a ringing cataract of coins of yellow gold! Below the shower of money, a semicircular basin, raised above the floor on pillars strangely carved, received the golden flood and lay full to the brim of clinking pieces of gold rising, falling, tossing, and washing about like waters in a pool. About the brim of the fountain there ran a sculptured band of stone whereon men were shown engaged in honorable labor—the farmer scattered the seed, the harvester gathered the grain, the smith labored at his forge, and a master workman carved a fair statue from a block of faultless stone.
And Hugh, pausing to look at the pieces of gold, saw that they were of ancient years and sealed with the seal of old, forgotten kings.
Now it came to pass that, when Hugh had filled his pockets and his hat with gold, he discovered a third adamant door leading from the chamber and, passing through it, found himself blinking in the sunlight on the further side of the hill. Strange to say, in the wall of stone behind him there was never a sign or appearance of a door!
But the mighty foe within—what could it be? He had seen nothing of the trigorgon, the thith, the winged bogus, the whiskeroarer, the mistophant, or the vrish. Yet the inscription had said that he must conquer a foe. Suddenly Hugh threw his hands into the air with a great merry shout; he had found the key to the mystery.
It was all a wise jest of the old knight. The foe to be conquered was fear, and “the mighty foe within” meant the host of silly fears which run and hide in the house of one’s heart. The treasure had been guarded against men by their own fears. Brave men, who sent fears hurrying and scurrying out of their hearts, alone were worthy of the prize.
As for the trigorgon, the thith, the winged bogus, the whiskeroarer, the mistophant, and the ugsome vrish, they had never existed, for they were not creatures, but silly, thoughtless imaginings and fears.