, 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."

Could old Malakh possibly know something of the king? The hope
returned to St. George insistently, and he watched, spending his
thought in new and extravagant conjecture, his mental vision
blurring the details of that heaped-up, glistening confusion; and on
the opposite side of the table the old man lifted and laid down
that rainbow stuff of dreams, delighting in it, speaking softly
above it. Had he been the king's friend, St. George was asking--but
why did no one know anything of him? Or had he been an enemy who had
done the king violence--but how was that possib