They went down among the very roots of the palace, three full storeys below the surface of the summit. Jarvo went before, lighting the way, and they threaded vaulted corridors and winding passages, and emerged at last in a silent, haunted chamber whose stones had been hewn and sunken there, before Issus. This was the chamber of the tombs of the kings, and its floor echoed to their footsteps, now hollowly, now with ringing clearness. Three sides of the mighty hall were lined with loculi or niches, each as deep as the length of a man. About the floor stood stone sarcophagi and beneath the long flags kings were sleeping, each with his abandoned name graven on the stones, washed year-long by the dark. In the room's centre was a lofty cylindrical tomb, mounted by four steps, and this was the resting-place of King Abibaal, the younger son of King Abibaal of Tyre, and the brother to King Hiram, who ruled in Tyre when the Phœnicians who settled Yaque, or Arqua, first passed the Straits of Gibraltar and gained the open sea. ("Dear me," said Mrs. Hastings when they told her, "I was at Mount Vernon once, and the Washingtons' tombs there impressed me very deeply, but they were nothing to these in point of age, were they?") Sunken in the wall was a tomb of white marble hewn in a five-faced pyramidion, where slept Queen Mitygen, who ruled in Yaque while Alexander was king of Persia. There was said to have been buried with her a casket of love-letters from Alexander, who may have known Yaque and probably at one time visited it and, in that case, was entertained in the very palace. And if this is true the story of his omission to conquer the island may one day divert the world.
Jarvo bent before a low tomb whose stone was delicately scored with winged circles.
"Perhaps," he said, "you will recall the accounts of the kidnapped Egyptian priestesses sold to the Theoprotions by Phœnician merchants in the heroic age of Greece? They were not all sold. Here lie the bones of four, given royal burial because of their holy office."
Nothing was unbelievable—nothing had been unbelievable for so long that these four had almost learned that everything is possible. Which, if you come to think of it, and no matter how absurdly you learn it, is a thing immeasurably worth realizing in this world of possibilities. It is one of our two magics.
"And this," Jarvo said softly, pausing before a vacant niche opposite the tomb of King Abibaal, "this will be the receptacle for the present king of Yaque, his Majesty, King Otho, by the grace of God."
Olivia suddenly looked up at St. George, her face pale in the ghostly light. There it had been, waiting for them all the while, the sense of the vivid personal against the vague eternal. But her involuntary appeal to him, slight as it was, thrilled St. George with tenderness as vivid as this tragic element itself.
They went back to the sun and the sweet messengering air above, and crossed a little vacant grassy court on the north side of the mountain. Here they saw that the palace climbed down the northern slope from the summit, and literally overhung the precipice where the supports were made fast by gigantic girders run in the living rock. A little observatory was built below the edge of the mountain, and this box of a place had a glass floor, and one felt like a fly on the sky as one stood there. It was said that a certain king of Yaque, sometime in the course of the Punic Wars, had thrown himself from this observatory in a rage because his court electrician had died, but how true this may be it is impossible to say because so little is known about electricity. Below the building lay quite the most wonderful part of the king's palace.
Here in the long north rooms, hermetically quiet, was the heart of the treasure of the ancient island. Here, saved inexplicably from the wreck of the past, were a thousand testimonies to that lost and but half-guessed art of the elder world. Beautiful things, made in the days when King Solomon built the Temple at Jerusalem, lined the walls, and filled the stone shelves, together with curios of that later day when Phœnicia stood first in knowledge of the plastic and glyptic arts. Workers in gold and ivory, in gems and talismans, in brass and fine linen and purple had done the marvels which those courtier adventurers brought with them over the sea, and to these, from year to year, had been added the treasure of private chests—necklaces and coronals and hair-loops, bottles and vases of glass coloured with metallic oxides, and patterned aggry-beads, now sometimes found in ancient tombs on the Ashantee coasts. Beneath an altar set with censers and basins of gold was a chest brought from Amathus, its ogive lid carved with bigæ or two-horsed chariots, and it was in this chest, Jarvo told them, that the Hereditary Treasure had been kept. The chamber walls were covered with bas-reliefs in the ill-proportioned and careful carving of the Phœnician artists not yet under Greek influence, and all about were set the wonderful bronzes, such as Tyrian artificers made for the Temple. The other chambers gave still deeper utterance to days remote, for it was there that the king's library had been collected in case after case, filled with parchment rolls preserved and copied from age to age. What might not be there, they wondered—annals, State documents, the Phœnician originals of histories preserved elsewhere only in fragments of translation or utterly lost, the secrets of science and magic known to men the very forms of whose names have perished; and not only the longed-for poems of Sido and Jopas, but of who could tell how many singing hearts, lyric with joy and love and still voiceful here in these strange halls? These were chambers such as no one has ever entered, for this was the vexing of no unviolated tomb and no buried city, but the actual return to the Past, watching lonely on the mountain.
"Clusium," said Amory softly. "I had actually wanted to go to the cemetery at Clusium, to see some inscriptions!"
"No, you didn't, Toby," said St. George pleasantly, "you wanted to go somewhere and you called it Clusium. You wanted an adventure and you thought Clusium was the name of it."