For a long half-hour we continued our dismal way. The winding passage had now straightened to a run in a direct line. Suddenly the flickering torchlight shone on a great yellowish mass.
The beauteous white face of Atma turned toward me.
"The great image of Thoat!" she cried. "Surely we have at last reached the vault of riches!"
Before a great doorway stood a huge, grotesque idol of a bird-headed god. In one massive claw it held a stone scroll that bore many hieroglyphics. The richly painted surface of the grim deity flashed yellow and red in the torchlight.
The two terrorized blacks, since making their reluctant entry to the gloomy corridor, had huddled closely together. Great beads of perspiration were standing on their brows, and now, at the sight of this grim omen, they trembled as though suddenly afflicted with ague.
"The God of the Ancients!" whispered the dwarf. "The terrible god with the bird-head who will presently awake and tear us to pieces with his sharp beak and claws. We are doomed! We are twice horribly doomed, as our spirits will be forever compelled to sail the endless sea of fire that has been allotted as punishment for those who enter the vaults of their ancestors."
The girl but smiled at the words, and wresting the light from the terrorized Usanti, she held the torch high to look long at the ancient inscription before her.
"It's only one of those meaningless warnings," she laughed at length in a careless manner. "A warning and praise of Sheba's glory. The usual custom of the ancients. It reads:
"The Queen is not dead. She can never die. She has become as one who rises like the morning sun from the eastern horizon. She now rests from life like the setting sun in the west. Yet always shall she return. Again on some far distant day will she dawn anew in the east. She cannot die. She must not die. She is the sun. She is the burning glory of life. She lives for ever. The Queen has but flown. She has been taken up to the skies by Ra. The stairs of the heavens have been lowered that she may ascend thereon to the blue. To the sky. To the sky. To the great jeweled throne in the clearness has she gone. Sail on, oh beauteous one, in thy barge of the sun. Sail on till you return like a flaming ruby to your earthly realm. Yet even as thou hast departed, oh Queen, let thy earthly shell retain and use its terrible powers to blast with loathsome disease and frightful death all those who would enter to disturb thy earthly slumbers, or touch with vandal hands one glittering jewel."
As Atma ceased speaking, the hideous Usanti fell to his knees with a shriek that rang out through that dismal hall of silence.
Like a tigress the Princess of Egypt turned on the offending black.
"Silence!" she hissed, as one hand flew to her leather holster in a suggestive manner. "Silence, you fool, or you will feel my own way of blasting frightful death!"
The terrorized dwarf gulped loudly as though choked by unseen hands. A weak sigh escaped the trembling lips, but with an effort he rose on his frail legs, to look piteously at his mistress.
Pausing but to encircle the great image, the tireless Atma motioned us to follow, and going to the ancient door pushed back the massive creaking barrier, while behind her, three wide-eyed men looked in speechless wonderment at the scene before them.
A low moaning sound; a soft musical wailing that might have been a murmur from the ages, floated from the silent
