gon between his teeth.

'Then will I cut a path with my guards,' was the proud answer;
'ay, even in the presence of thy sanctuary, and through the bodies
of thy priests.'

Agon turned livid with baffled fury. He glanced at the people
as though meditating an appeal to them, but saw clearly that
their sympathies were all the other way. The Zu-Vendi are a
very curious and sociable people, and great as was their sense
of the enormity that we had committed in shooting the sacred
hippopotami, they did not like the idea of the only real live
strangers they had seen or heard of being consigned to a fiery
furnace, thereby putting an end for ever to their chance of extracting
knowledge and information from, and gossiping about us. Agon
saw this and hesitated, and then for the first time Nyleptha
spoke in her soft sweet voice.

'Bethink thee, Agon,' she said, 'as my sister Queen has said,
these men may also be servants of the Sun. For themselves they
cannot speak, for their tongues are tied. Let the matter be
adjourned till such time as they have learnt our language. Who
can be condemned without a hearing? When these men can plead
for themselves, then it will be time to put them to the proof.'

Here was a clever loophole of escape, and the vindictive old
priest took it, little as he liked it.

'So be it, oh Queens,' he said. 'Let the men go in peace, and
when they have learnt our tongue then let them speak. And I,
even I, will make humble supplication at the altar lest pestilence
fall on the land by cause of the sacrilege.'

These words were received with a murmur of applause, and in another
minute we were marching out of the temple surrounded by the royal
guards.

But it was not till long afterwards that we learnt the exact
substance of what had passed, and how hardly our lives had been
wrung out of the cruel grip of the Zu-Vendi priesthood, in the
face of which even the Queens were practically powerless. Had
it not been for their strenuous efforts to protect us we should
have been slain even before we set foot in the Temple of the
Sun. The attempt to drop us bodily into the fiery pit as an
offering was a last artifice to attain this end when several
others quite unsuspected by us had already failed.

CHAPTER XV
SORAIS' SONG

After our escape from Agon and his pious crew we returned to
our quarters in the palace and had a very good time. The two
Queens, the nobles and the people vied with each