“A reductio ad absurdum, my young friend,” said the lawyer sternly; “the real purpose of eating will remain for ever unchanged.”

Later, while Mrs. Hastings and Mr. Frothingham went out on the terrace in the sun and wished for a morning paper ("I miss the weather report so,” complained Mrs. Hastings) the four young people with Jarvo and Akko for guides set out to explore the palace.  For St. George had risen from his two hours’ sleep with some clearly-defined projects, and he meant first to go over every niche and corner of the great pile where one—­say a king—­might be hidden with twenty other kings, and no one be at all the wiser.

What a morning it was!  When the rollicking wind got to that part of the story it must have told about it in such intimating perfumes that even the unimaginative were constrained to sit idle, “thinking delicate thoughts.”  There never was a fairer temple of romance, a very temple of Young Love’s Plaisaunce; and since the coming of St. George and Amory all the cavernous chambers and galleries were become homes of hope that the king would be found and all would yet be well.

To the main part of the palace there were storey after storey, all octagons and pentagons and labyrinths, so that incredulity and amazement might increase with every step.  How they had ever raised those massive blocks of stone to that great height no one can guess unless, indeed, Amory’s theory were correct and the palace had originally been built upon level ground and had had its surroundings blasted neatly away to make a mountain.  At all events there were the walls of the great airy rooms made of the naked stone, exquisitely beveled and chiseled, and frescoed with the planetary deities—­Eloti, the Moon with her chariot drawn by white bulls, the Sun and his four horses, with his emblem of a column in the form of a rising flame—­types taken from the heavens and from the abyss.  There were roofs of sound fir and sweet cedar, carven cornices, cave-like window embrasures with no glass, and little circular rooms built about shrines in which sat broken images of Baal the sun god, of a sandaled Astarte, and a ravening Melkarth, with the lion’s skin.

From a great upper corridor there went a stairway, each deep step of which was placed on the back of a stone lion of increasing size, until the tallest lion’s head extended close to the painted ceiling, and there were comfortable benches cut in his gigantic paws.  Many of the rooms were without furnishing, some were filled with vague, splendid stuff mouldering away, and others with most luxuriously-devised ministries to beauty and comfort.  The palace was curiously and wonderfully an habitation of more than two thousand years ago, furnished with a taste and luxury in advance of this moment’s civilization of the world.  The heart of that elder world beat strangely in one of the upper chambers where they came upon a little work-shop, strewn with unknown metals and tools and empty crucibles, and in their midst a rectangular metallic plate partly traced with a device of boughs, appearing, in one light, slightly fluorescent.