arts, dressing in skins and uncleanness, harbouring in
caves and the tree-tops. The beasts roamed about where they would, and
hunted them unchecked."

"Still, they fought you for their liberty?"

"Never once. They knew how disastrous was their masterless freedom. Even
to their dull, savage brains it was a sure thing that no slavery could
be worse; and to that state you, and your friends, and your theories,
will reduce Atlantis, if you get the upper hand. But, then, to argue
in a circle, you will never get it. For to conquer, you must set up
leaders, and once you have set them up, you will never pull them down
again."

"Aye," she said with a sigh, "there is truth in that last."

The torch had filled the captain's room with a resinous smoke, but the
flame was growing pale. Dawn was coming in greyly through a slender
arrow-slit, and with it ever and again the glow from some mountain out
of sight, which was shooting forth spasmodic bursts of fire. With it
also were mutterings of distant falling rocks, and sullen tremblings,
which had endured all the night through, and I judged that earth was in
one of her quaking moods, and would probably during the forthcoming day
offer us some chastening discomforts.

On this account, perhaps, my senses were stilled to certain evidences
which would otherwise have given me a suspicion; and also, there is no
denying that my general wakefulness was sapped by another matter. This
woman, Nais, interested me vastly out of the common; the mere presence
of her seemed to warm the organs of my interior; and whilst she was
there, all my thoughts and senses were present in the room of the
captain of the gate in which we sat.

But of a sudden the floor of the chamber rocked and fell away beneath
me, and in a tumult of dust, and litter, and bales of the captain's
plunder, I fell down (still seated on the flagstone) into a pit which
had been digged beneath it. With the violence of the descent, and the
flutter of all these articles about my head, I was in no condition for
immediate action; and whilst I was still half-stunned by the shock, and
long before I could get my eyes into service again, I had been seized,
and bound, and half-strangled with a noose of hide. Voices were raised
that I should be despatched at once out of the way; but one in authority
cried out that, killing me at leisure, and as a prisoner, promised more
genteel sport; and so I was thrust down on the floor, whilst a whole
army