Past grim latchless doors sealing, with appropriate gestures, their forgotten secrets, past outlying passages winding into the heart of the mountain, past niches filled with shapeless crumbling rubbish they hurried—­the mad old man and his bewildered pursuer.  Twice the way turned, gradually narrowing until two could hardly have passed there, and at last apparently terminated in a short flight of steps.  Old Malakh mounted with difficulty and St. George, waiting, saw him standing before a blank stone wall.  Immediately and without effort the old man’s scanty strength served to displace one of the wall’s huge stones which hung upon a secret pivot and rolled noiselessly within.  He stepped through the aperture, and St. George sprang behind him, watched his moment to cross the threshold, crouched in the leaping shadow of the displaced stone and looked—­looked with the undistinguishing amazement that a man feels in the panorama of his dreams.

The room was small and low and set with a circular bench, running about a central pillar.  On the table was a confusion of things brilliantly phosphorescent, emitting soft light, and mingled with bulbs, coils and crucibles lying in a litter of egg-shells, feathers, ivory and paper.  But it was not these that held St. George incredulous; it was the fire that glowed in their midst—­a fire that leaped and trembled and blazed inextinguishable colour, smouldering, sparkling, tossing up a spray of strange light, lambent with those wizard hues of the pennons and streamers floating joyously from the dome of the Palace of the Litany—­the fire from the subject hearts of a thousand jewels.  There could be no doubting what he saw.  There, flung on the table from the mouth of a carven casket and harbouring the captive light of ages gone, glittered what St. George knew would be the gems of the Hereditary Treasure of the kings of Yaque.

But for old Malakh to know where the jewels were—­that was as amazing as was their discovery.  St. George, breathing hard in his corner, watched the long, fine hands of the old man trembling among the delicate tubes and spindles, lingering lovingly among the stones, touching among the necklaces and coronals of the dead queens whose dust lay not far away.  It was as if he were summoning and discarding something shining and imponderable, like words.  The contents of the casket which all Yaque had mourned lay scattered in this secret place of which only this strange, mad creature, a chance pensioner at the palace, had knowledge.

Suddenly the memory of Balator’s words smote St. George with new perception.  “He walks the streets of Med,” Balator had told him at the banquet, “saying ‘Melek, Melek,’ which is to say ‘king,’ and so he is seeking the king.  But he is mad, and he weeps; and therefore they pretend to believe that he says, ‘Malakh,’ which is to say ‘salt,’ and they call him that, for his tears.”