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
poss