once had served
travelers who passed by here in the days when Mars was a green planet.

It was an unusually elaborate well, and amazingly well preserved. Its
rim had been inlaid with a mosaic pattern whose symbolism must once have
borne deep meaning, and above it in a great fan of time-defying bronze
an elaborate grille-work portrayed the inevitable tree-of-life pattern
which so often appears in the symbolism of the three worlds. Smith
looked at it a bit incredulously from his shelter, it was so
miraculously preserved amidst all this chaos of broken stone, casting a
delicate tracery of shadow on the sunny pavement as perfectly as it must
have done a million years ago when dusty travelers paused here to drink.
He could picture them filing in at noontime through the great gates
that----

The vision vanished abruptly as his questing eyes made the circle of the
ruined walls. There had been no gate. He could not find a trace of it
anywhere around the outer wall of the court. The only entrance here, as
nearly as he could tell from the foundations that remained, had been the
door in whose ruins he now stood. Queer. This must have been a private
court, then, its great grille-crowned well reserved for the use of the
priests. Or wait--had there not been a priest-king Illar after whom the
city was named? A wizard-king, so legend said, who ruled temple as well
as palace with an iron hand. This elaborately patterned well, of
material royal enough to withstand the weight of ages, might well have
been sacrosanct for the use of that long-dead monarch. It might----

* * * * *

Across the sun-bright pavement swept the shadow of a plane. Smith dodged
back into deeper hiding while the ship circled low over the courtyard.
And it was then, as he crouched against a crumbled wall and waited,
motionless, for the danger to pass, that he became aware for the first
time of a sound that startled him so he could scarcely credit his
ears--a recurrent sound, choked and sorrowful--the sound of a woman
sobbing.

The incongruity of it made him forgetful for a moment of the peril
hovering overhead in the sun-hot outdoors. The dimness of the temple
ruins became a living and vital place for that moment, throbbing with
the sound of tears. He looked about half in incredulity, wondering if
hunger and thirst were playing tricks on him already, or if these broken
halls might be haunted by a million-years-old sorrow that wept a