at we were
using the bed of a watercourse for a road. Exactly in front of
us, glimpsed through a twelve-foot gap between cliffs six hundred
feet high, was a sight worth going twice that distance, running
twice that risk, to see--a rose-red temple front, carved out
of the solid valley wall and glistening in the opalescent
hues of morning.

Not even Burkhardt, who was the first civilized man to see the
place in a thousand years, described that temple properly;
because you can't. It is huge--majestic--silent--empty--aglow
with all the prism colors in the morning sun. And it seems
to think.

It takes you so by surprise when you first see it that in face of
that embodied mystery of ancient days your brain won't work, and
you want to sit spellbound. But Grim had done our thinking for
us, so that we were not the only ones surprised. Such was the
confidence of safety that those huge walls and the narrow
entrance to the place inspire that Ali Higg had set only four men
to keep the gate; and they slept with their weapons beside them,
never believing that strangers would dare essay that ghost-haunted
ravine by night.

They were pounced on and tied almost before their eyes were open;
and, catching sight of Jael Higg first, and getting only a
glimpse of Grim, they rather naturally thought their chief had
caught them napping; so they neither cried out nor made any
attempt to defend themselves; and presently, when they discovered
their mistake, the fear of being crucified for having slept on
duty kept them dumb.

Grim led the way straight to that amazing temple, and we invaded
it, camels and all, off-loading the camels inside in a hurry and
then driving them out again to lie down in the wide porch between
the columns and the temple wall. The porch was so vast that even
all our string of camels did not crowd it.

The main part of the interior was a perfect cube of forty feet,
all hand-hewn from the cliff, and there were numerous rooms
leading out of it that had once been occupied by the priests of
Isis, but "the lion and the lizard" had lived in them since their
day. We put the prisoners, including Ayisha's four men, in one
room under guard.

That much was hardly accomplished when the spirit of our
seventeen thieves reacted to their surroundings, and all the
advantage of our secret arrival was suddenly undone. Half of them
had gone outside to tie the camels, under Ali Baba's watchful
eye; and it was he, as a matter of fact,