iscovery.

Twenty minutes' scrambling brought me to a place where the fallen jambs
of a fine doorway lay so close together that there was barely room to
pass between them. However, seeing light beyond, I squeezed through,
and I found myself in the best-preserved chamber of all--a wide, roomy
hall with a domed roof, a haze of mural paintings on the walls, and a
marble floor nearly hidden in a century of fallen dust. I stumbled over
something at the threshold, and picking it up, found it was a baby's
skull! And there were more of them now that my eyes became accustomed
to the light. The whole floor was mottled with them--scores and
hundreds of bones and those poor little relics of humanity jutting out
of the sand everywhere. In the hush of that great dead nursery the
little white trophies seemed inexpressibly pathetic, and I should have
turned back reverently from that chamber of forgotten sorrows but that
something caught my eye in the centre of it.

It was an oblong pile of white stone, very ill-used and chipped,
wrist-deep in dust, yet when a slant of light came in from above and
fell straight upon it, the marble against the black gloom beyond blazed
like living pearl. It was dazzling; and shading my eyes and going
tenderly over through the poor dead babes, I looked, and there, full in
the shine, lay a woman's skeleton, still wrapped in a robe of which
little was left save the hard gold embroidery. Her brown hair,
wonderful to say, still lay like lank, dead seaweed about her, and
amongst it was a fillet crown of plain iron set with gems such as eye
never looked upon before. There were not many, but enough to make the
proud simplicity of that circlet glisten like a little band of fire--a
gleaming halo on her dead forehead infinitely fascinating. At her
sides were two other little bleached human flowers, and I stood before
them for a long time in silent sympathy.

Could this be Queen Yang, of whom the woodcutter had told me? It must
be--who else? And if it were, what strange chance had brought me
here--a stranger, yet the first to come, since her sorrow, from her
distant kindred? And if it were, then that fillet belonged of right to
Heru, the last representative of her kind. Ought I not to take it to
her rather than leave it as spoil to the first idle thief with pluck
enough to deride the mysteries of the haunted city? Long time I thought
over it in the faint, heavy atmosphere of that hall, and then very
gentl