"So we hits th' road. We reckoned if we follered it long enough, we prob'ly strike some place. So we plugs along through th' dark. We warn't worryin' none about Schleimacher. Nothin' ever happens to a full-blooded Marine, anyhow, and we had other things to think about.
"'Did ye notice th' tire round his neck?' I says. 'That tire'll cost us a mont' extry.'
"Terry grunts. 'Considerin' th' months we'll get anyhow,' he says, disgusted-like, 'an extry one is what I'd call superfalous.'
"And so," the voice concluded thoughtfully, "we plugs along."
CHAPTER VI
THE VALLEY OF SUNSHINE AND SHADOW
The voice died away and it was still, with a breathless silence which made the beating of my heart ring in my ears. It was as though I stood outside the world, in the Empty Places. And then slowly consciousness returned, if I had been unconscious, and I opened my eyes and found that I was no longer in that old temple of Tzin Piaôu. I was glad of that. I had grown weary and half afraid of seeing that old man who lay there on his slab of stone, looking, looking, looking into vacancy, watching the strivings and disasters and the grimy ludicrousness of his fellows, while a little flame of derisive laughter danced and flickered in his eyes. He seemed to me in truth a heathen man.
Now I lay in a spacious, dusky chamber, on a wide divan cushioned with softest stuff, and above me, suspended from the lofty ceiling by curiously wrought chains of silver and swaying slowly, silver lamps burned very dimly, and the swaying light and shadow of them moved on the age-blackened teak-wood of the floor and the mellowed silken tapestries with which the walls were hung. The air was sweet, and very heavy, with the fumes of burning incense, and it was vibrant with the rise and fall of many distant voices, as if they spoke softly, or prayed, perhaps, in unison.
In my wonderment, I stirred a little on my couch, and from a dusky corner of the chamber a woman came swiftly forward and stood before me,—such a woman as I had never thought to behold. If every perfection of every perfect beauty men have famed could have been stolen to deck one woman only, and have been blended cunningly together by a master hand and made instinct with life, that might have been the birth of her I looked on then.
A thin gold circlet glinted dully in the darkness of her hair, and she was robed in a single garment of some thin, clinging, gauzy, precious stuff which revealed the more fully her womanly perfections, the while it pretended to conceal them. She walked swiftly and lightly, with lithe hips swaying in the way of Eastern women, and her rosy feet twinkled in the swaying yellow lamplight; she came and stood before me and looked down with serious, starry eyes.