Iona set her lamp on the rock, changed the troughs, and carefully raised the net in the one through which the water had been passing, and with a little wire spade turned over the débris left there. Where a yellow glimmer showed, she picked it out and put it into the wallet hanging at her side.
The night was so still that the flame of the lamp scarcely wavered; but she swung her coil of lighted taper to and fro, and round in a circle, to catch any glimmer of the precious metal hidden there.
There was neither tree nor shrub in sight. Grotesque peaks and cliffs rose on every side, shutting her in. Scintillating overhead was the Milky Way, a white torrent of stars from the heights of heaven flowing between the black rock-rims that it seemed almost to touch.
The gold came in glimmer after glimmer, some almost too small to gather out of the slippery débris, others half as large as the flame of the lamp, and brightly glowing.
Iona’s spirit revived a little. The place, the time, and the occupation took her out of the track of her habitual life. She recollected her first visit to this place, when she and Dylar were children. They came with his father. The prince had brought her after her father’s death, hoping to distract her; and while she and the boy picked out the shining grains, he sat on a lichened rock beside them, and told how men had spent their lives in searching for and compounding the philosopher’s stone in order to make at will this bright king of metals which they were gathering from the sand.
He told how kings and queens had lavished patronage and treasure on such seekers after hidden knowledge, and the names by which the magic stone was called: The daughter of the great secret; The sun and his father; The moon and her mother. He told them the legend that St. John, the Evangelist, could make gold; and young Dylar paused in his search to learn the verses of an old hymn to the saint that the alchemists applied to themselves:—
“Inexhaustum fert thesaurum
Qui de virgis faeit aurum,
Gemmas de lapidibus.”
He described to them the dry way and the humid way, the white powder, that changed metals to fine silver, the red elixir, which made gold and healed all sorts of wounds, the white elixir, white daughter of the philosophers, which made silver and prolonged life indefinitely. He told them the prediction of a German philosopher that in the nineteenth century gold would be produced by galvanism, and become so common that kitchen utensils would be made of it. “But that,” the prince added, “will surely be a gift of wrath, and will come like a thunderbolt. Men will play with fire, and it will turn upon them. They will laugh in the face of God when they snatch his lightnings out of his hand, and he will reduce them to ashes. But to him who kneels and waits, into his hand will God put the lightning, and it shall be as dew to his palm when he smites with it.”