At last it was done, and we stood by the great road,
on that side of the pit which is opposite to the Colossi.
At the side of the road, a hundred yards off, a fire
was burning in front of some huts, and round the fire
were figures. We staggered towards them, supporting
one another, and halting every few paces. Presently
one of the figures rose, saw us and fell on to the
ground, crying out for fear.
“Infadoos, Infadoos! it is we, thy friends.”
He rose; he ran to us, staring wildly, and still shaking
with fear.
“Oh, my lords, my lords, it is indeed you come
back from the dead!— come back from the
dead!”
And the old warrior flung himself down before us,
and clasping Sir
Henry’s knees, he wept aloud for joy.
IGNOSI’S FAREWELL
Ten days from that eventful morning found us once
more in our old quarters at Loo; and, strange to say,
but little the worse for our terrible experience,
except that my stubbly hair came out of the treasure
cave about three shades greyer than it went in, and
that Good never was quite the same after Foulata’s
death, which seemed to move him very greatly.
I am bound to say, looking at the thing from the point
of view of an oldish man of the world, that I consider
her removal was a fortunate occurrence, since, otherwise,
complications would have been sure to ensue.
The poor creature was no ordinary native girl, but
a person of great, I had almost said stately, beauty,
and of considerable refinement of mind. But no
amount of beauty or refinement could have made an
entanglement between Good and herself a desirable
occurrence; for, as she herself put it, “Can
the sun mate with the darkness, or the white with
the black?”
I need hardly state that we never again penetrated
into Solomon’s treasure chamber. After
we had recovered from our fatigues, a process which
took us forty-eight hours, we descended into the great
pit in the hope of finding the hole by which we had
crept out of the mountain, but with no success.
To begin with, rain had fallen, and obliterated our
spoor; and what is more, the sides of the vast pit
were full of ant-bear and other holes. It was
impossible to say to which of these we owed our salvation.
Also, on the day before we started back to Loo, we
made a further examination of the wonders of the stalactite
cave, and, drawn by a kind of restless feeling, even
penetrated once more into the Chamber of the Dead.
Passing beneath the spear of the White Death we gazed,
with sensations which it would be quite impossible
for me to describe, at the mass of rock that had shut
us off from escape, thinking the while of priceless
treasures beyond, of the mysterious old hag whose
flattened fragments lay crushed beneath it, and of
the fair girl of whose tomb it was the portal.
I say gazed at the “rock,” for, examine
as we could, we could find no traces of the join of
the sliding door; nor, indeed, could we hit upon the
secret, now utterly lost, that worked it, though we
tried for an hour or more. It is certainly a
marvellous bit of mechanism, characteristic, in its
massive and yet inscrutable simplicity, of the age
which produced it; and I doubt if the world has such
another to show.
