ther embedded in the solid granite of the side
of the precipice.

This staircase with its supports was, indeed, a work of which
any living man might have been proud, both on account of its
magnitude and its surpassing beauty. Four times, as we afterwards
learnt, did the work, which was commenced in remote antiquity,
fail, and was then abandoned for three centuries when half-finished,
till at last there rose a youthful engineer named Rademas, who
said that he would complete it successfully, and staked his life
upon it. If he failed he was to be hurled from the precipice
he had undertaken to scale; if he succeeded, he was to be rewarded
by the hand of the king's daughter. Five years was given to
him to complete the work, and an unlimited supply of labour and
material. Three times did his arch fall, till at last, seeing
failure to be inevitable, he determined to commit suicide on
the morrow of the third collapse. That night, however, a beautiful
woman came to him in a dream and touched his forehead, and of
a sudden he saw a vision of the completed work, and saw too through
the masonry and how the difficulties connected with the flying
arch that had hitherto baffled his genius were to be overcome.
Then he awoke and once more commenced the work, but on a different
plan, and behold! he achieved it, and on the last day of the
five years he led the princess his bride up the stair and into
the palace. And in due course he became king by right of his
wife, and founded the present Zu-Vendi dynasty, which is to this
day called the 'House of the Stairway', thus proving once more
how energy and talent are the natural stepping-stones to grandeur.
And to commemorate his triumph he fashioned a statue of himself
dreaming, and of the fair woman who touched him on the forehead,
and placed it in the great hall of the palace, and there it stands
to this day.

Such was the great stair of Milosis, and such the city beyond.
No wonder they named it the 'Frowning City', for certainly those
mighty works in solid granite did seem to frown down upon our
littleness in their sombre splendour. This was so even in the
sunshine, but when the storm-clouds gathered on her imperial
brow Milosis looked more like a supernatural dwelling-place,
or some imagining of a poet's brain, than what she is --
a mortal city, carven by the patient genius of generations out
of the red silence of the mountain side.

CHAPTER XII
THE SISTER QUEENS