“It is the work of the Princess Simyra, adon,” said Jarvo.  “She was the daughter of King Thabion, and when she died what she had touched in this room was left unmoved.  But it was very many years ago—­I have forgotten.  Every one has forgotten.”

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 Phoenicians 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 Phoenician 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.