r. Unlocked, the thing swung
ponderously at Kirby's push, and with the three girls pressing close
beside him, he entered--and stopped.

"Naida!" he gasped.

"Oh, _oh_!" she cried, and while Nini and Ivana gasped, she clapped her
hands in an instinctive, feminine reaction of joy. "But there are things
here which I believe none but the Ducas of our race have ever seen! Oh!
Why, the sacred girdle is as nothing compared to this display!"

By "display" she meant a treasure which took Kirby's breath away, which
made his heart act queerly.

The walls of the chamber were fashioned of polished blocks of obsidion
on which stood out in heavy bas-relief a maze of decorative figures
fashioned of pure, beaten gold--the same kind of gold which had gone
into the making of the cylinder of gold. With his first glance at the
gorgeously wrought motifs of Feathered Serpent and Sun and Moon symbols,
Kirby knew to a certainty whence the golden cylinder had come
originally.

But even the gold--literally tons of it there must have been--was
nothing compared to the gems.

* * * * *

They were spread out in blinding array upon a great table in the center
of the room. There were pearls as big as turkey eggs and whiter, softer
than the light of a June morning growing in the East. There were rubies.
One amongst the many was the size of a baseball and glowed like the
heart of a red star. The least of the two or three hundred gems would
have outclassed the greatest treasures of the Crown jewels of England
and Russia combined.

Most overwhelming of all, however, was the jewel which rested against a
square of black cloth all its own in the center of the table. While his
heart still acted queerly, while Naida, Nini, and Ivana hung back,
delighted, but still too bewildered to move, Kirby advanced and took
gingerly in his hands a single white diamond about eighteen inches long,
and almost as wide and deep as it was long.

The thing was carved with exquisite cunning to a likeness of the living
head of Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent.

Kirby dared not guess how many pounds the carven hunk of flashing,
blue-white carbon weighed. He knew only that like it there was no other
diamond in the world, and that the thing was real. Naida and the two
girls were silent now, and suddenly Kirby realized that to their awe of
the gem was added awe of deepest religious nature. Slowly he put the
diamond head of the Serpent back