The causeway down which the horsemen of forgotten kings of Khandawar had clattered forth to war, in its age-old desuetude had come to decay. Between its great paving blocks grass sprouted, and here and there creepers and even trees had taken root and in the slow immutable process of their growth had displaced considerable masses of stone; so that there were pitfalls to be avoided. Otherwise a litter of rubble made the walking anything but good. Amber picked his way with caution, grumbling.

The grade was rather more steep than it had seemed to be from the plain. Now and then he stopped to regain his breath and scrub a handkerchief over his forehead, on which sweat had started despite the cold. At such times his gaze would seek inevitably and involuntarily, the lotus-pointed pinnacle whereon the Eye was poised, blazing. Its baleful emerald glare coloured his mood unpleasantly. He had a fancy that the thing was actually watching him. The sensation was creepy.

For that matter, nothing that met his eye was calculated to instil cheer into his heart. Desolation worked with silence sensibly upon his thoughts, so that he presently made the alarming discovery that the bottom had dropped completely out of his stock of scepticism, leaving him seriously in danger of becoming afraid of the dark. Scowling over this, he stumbled on, telling himself that he was a fool: a conclusion so patent that neither then nor thereafter at any time did he find reason to dispute it.

After some three-quarters of an hour of hard climbing he came to the wooden bridge, and halted, surveying it with mistrust. Doubtless in the olden time a substantial but movable structure, strong enough to sustain a troop of warriors but light enough to be easily drawn up, had extended across the chasm, rendering the city impregnable from capture by assault. If so, it had long since been replaced by an airy and well-ventilated latticework of boards and timbers, none of which seemed to the wary eye any too sound. Amber selected the most solid-looking of the lot and gingerly advanced a pace or two along it. With a soft crackling a portion of the timber crumbled to dust beneath his feet. He retreated hastily to the causeway, and swore, and noticed that the Eye was watching him with malevolent interest, and swore some more. Entirely on impulse he heaved a bit of rock, possibly twenty pounds in weight, to the middle of the structure. There followed a splintering crash and the contraption dissolved like a magic-lantern effect, leaving a solitary beam about a foot in width and six or eight inches thick, spanning a flight of twenty and a drop of sixty feet. The river received the rubbish with several successive splashes, distinctly disconcerting, and Amber sat down on a boulder to think it over.

"Clever invention," he mused; "one'd think that, after taking all this trouble to get me here, they'd changed their minds about wanting me. I've a notion to change mine." He looked up at the cusped and battlemented gateway opposite him, shifted his regard to the Eye, and shook his fist vindictively at the latter. "If ever I get hold of the chap that invented you…!" An ingenious imagination failing to suggest any form of torture commensurate with the crime, he relapsed into gloomy meditation.

There seemed to be no possibility of turning back at that stage, however. Kuttarpur was rather far away, and, moreover, he doubted if he would be permitted to return. Having come thus far, he must go on. Moreover, Sophia Farrell was on the other side of that Swordwide Bridge, and such being the case, cross it he would though he were to find the next world at its end. Finally he considered that he was presently to undergo an Ordeal of some unknown nature, probably extremely unpleasant, and that this matter of the vanishing bridge must have been arranged in order to put him in a properly subdued and tractable frame of mind.

He got up and tested the remaining girder with circumspection and incredulity; but it seemed firm enough, solidly embedded in the stonework of the causeway and immovable at the city end. So he straddled it and, averting his eyes from the scenery beneath him, hitched ingloriously across, collecting splinters and a very distinct impression that, as a vocation, knight-errantry was not without its drawbacks.

When again he stood on his feet he was in the shadow of the outer gateway, the curtain of the second wall confronting him. The stillness remained unbroken but the moonlight illuminated with startling distinctness the frescoes, half obliterated by time, and they were monstrous, revolting and obscene, from a Western point of view. A bastion of the third wall hid the Eye, however; he was grateful for that.

Casting about, he discovered the second gateway at some distance to the left, and started toward it, forcing a way through a tangle of scrubby undergrowth, weeds, and thorny acacia, but had taken few steps ere a heavy splash in the river below brought him up standing, with a thumping heart. After an irresolute moment he turned back to see for himself, and found his apprehension only too well grounded; the Swordwide Bridge was gone, displaced by an agency which had been prompt to seek cover—though he confessed himself unable to suggest where that cover had been found. There was no one visible on the causeway, and nobody skulked in the shadows of the bastions of the main gate. Furthermore it seemed hardly possible that in so scant a space of time human hands could have worked that heavy beam out of its sockets. And if the hands had been human (of course any other hypothesis were ridiculous) what had become of their owners?

He gave it up, considering that it were futile to badger his wits for the how and the wherefore. The important fact remained that he was a prisoner in dead Kathiapur, his retreat cut off, and—Here he made a second discovery, infinitely more shocking: his pistol was gone.

Amber remembered distinctly examining the weapon in Dulla Dad's boat, since when he had found no occasion to think of it. Now either it had jolted out of his pocket in that wild ride from Kuttarpur, or else Naraini had managed deftly to abstract it while in his arms by the summer palace, or when, later, she had shrunk against him in real or affected terror of the Eye. Of the two explanations his reason favoured the second. But he made no audible comment, though his thoughts were as black as his brow and as grimly fashioned as the set of his jaw.

Turning back at length he made his way to the second gateway and from it to the third, under the lewdly sculptured arch of which he stopped and gasped, forgetting himself as for the first time Kathiapur the Fallen was revealed to him in all the awful beauty of its naked desolation.

A wide and stately avenue stretched away from the portals, between rows of dwellings, palaces of marble and stone, tombs and mausoleums, with meaner houses of sun-dried brick and rubble, roofless all and disintegrating in the slow, terrible process of the years. Here a wall had caved in, there an arch had fallen out. The thoroughfare was strewn with fallen lintels, broken marble screens, blocks of red sandstone, bricks, and in between them the fig and pipal nourished with the bebel-thorn, the ak, the mimosa, the insidious convolvulus twining everywhere. At the far end of the street a yawning black arch rose in the white, beautiful faÇade of a marble temple on whose uppermost pinnacle the Eye hovered, staring horridly.

As Amber moved forward small, alert ghosts rose from the undergrowth and scurried silently thence: a circumstance which made him very unhappy. Even a brilliant chorus of sharp barks from an adjacent street failed to convince him that he had merely disturbed a pack of jackals, after all, and not the disconsolate brooding wraiths of those who had died and been buried in the imposing ruined tombs, what time Kathiapur boasted ten thousand swords and elephants by the herd.

The way was difficult and Amber tired. After a while, having seen nothing but the jackals, an owl or two, several thousand bats and a crawling thing which had lurched along in the shadow of a wall some distance away, giving an admirable imitation of a badly wounded man pulling himself over the ground, and making strange gutteral noises—Amber concluded to wait for the guide Naraini had promised him. He turned aside and seated himself upon the edge of a broken sandstone tomb. The silence was appalling and for relief he took refuge in cheap irreverence. "Home," he observed aloud, "never was like this."

A heart-rending sigh from the tomb behind him was followed by a rattle of dislodged rubbish. Amber found himself unexpectedly in the middle of the street and, without stopping to debate the method of his getting there with such unprecedented rapidity, looked back hopefully to the tomb. At the same moment a black-shrouded figure swept out of it and moved a few paces down the street, then paused and beckoned him with a gaunt arm. "I wish," said Amber earnestly, "I had that gun."

The figure was apparently that of a native swathed in black from his head to his heels and seemed the more strikingly peculiar in view of the fact that, as far as Amber could determine, he had neither eyes nor features although his head was without any sort of covering. He gulped over the proposition for an instant, then stepped forward.

"Evidently my appointed cicerone," he considered. "Unquestionably this ghost-dance is excellently stage-managed…. Though, of course, I had to pick out that particular tomb."

He followed in the wake of the figure, which sped on with a singular motion, something between a walk and a glide, conscious that his equanimity had been restored rather than shaken by the incident. "You wouldn't think," he reflected, "that a man like Salig Singh would lend himself to anything so childish. Still, I'm not through with it yet." He conceived a scheme to steal up behind his guide and strip him of his masquerade, but though he mended his pace he got no nearer, and eventually abandoned it on the consideration that it was probably most inadvisable. After all, he had to remember that he was there for a purpose, and a very serious one, and that properly to further that purpose he must comport himself with dignity, submissively, accepting, at least with a show of ease, each new development of the affair along its prearranged lines. And so he held on in pursuit of the black shadow, passing forsaken temples and lordly pleasure-houses, all marble tracery and fretwork, standing apart in what had once been noble gardens, sunken tanks all weed-grown and rank with slime, humbler dooryards and cots on whose hearthstones the fires for centuries had been cold—his destination evidently the temple of the unspeakable Eye.

As they drew nearer the leading shadow forsook the shade of the walls which he had seemed to favour, sweeping hastily across a plaza white with moonglare and without pause on into the black, gaping hole beyond the marble arch.

Here for the first time Amber hung back, stopping a score of feet from the door, his nerves a-jangle. He did not falter in his purpose; he was going to enter the inky portal, but … would he ever leave it? And the world was still sweet to him. His quick, darting gaze registered a dozen impressions in as many seconds: of the silver splendour spilled so lavishly upon the soulless corpse of the city, of the high, bright sky, of dead black shadows sharp-edged against the radiance, of the fleet flitting spectre that was really a flying-fox….

Afar a hyena laughed with a sardonic intonation wholly uncalled-for—it was blood-curdling, besides. And down the street a melancholy air breathed gently, sighing like a soul astray.

"This won't do," he told himself; "it can't be worse inside than out here."

He took firm hold of his reason and went on across the dark threshold, took three uncertain strides into the limitless unknown, and pulled up short, hearing nothing, unable to see a yard before him. Then with a terrific crash like a thunder-clap the great doors swung to behind him. He whirled about with a stifled cry, conscious of a mad desire to find the doors again, took a step or two toward them, paused to wonder if he were moving in the right direction, moved a little to the left, half turned, and was lost. Reverberating, the echoes of the crash rolled far away and back again, diminishing in volume, dying until they were no more than as a whisper adrift in the silence, until that was gone….

Profound night enveloped him, vast, breathless, without dimensions. One can endure the blackness that abides within four well-kenned walls; but night unrelieved by the least gleam of light, night without bounds or measurements, enfolding one like a stifling blanket and instilling into the brain the fear of nameless things, quickening the respiration and oppressing the heart—that is another thing entirely, and that is what Amber found in the Temple of the Bell. Darkness swam visibly before his eyes, like a fluid. The sound of his constrained breathing seemed most loud and unnatural. He could hear his heart rumbling like a distant drum.

Digging his nails into his palms, he waited; and in the suspense of dread began to count the seconds.

One minute … two … three … four….

He shifted his weight from one foot to the other….

Seven …

He passed a hand across his face and brought it away wet with perspiration….

Nine …

In some remote spot a bell began to toll; at first slowly—clang!… clang!… clang!—then more quickly, until the roar of its sonorous, gong-like tones seemed to fill all the world and to set it a-tremble. Then, insensibly, the tempo became more sedate, the fierce clamour of it moderated, and Amber abruptly was alive to the fact that the bell was speaking—that its voice, deep, clear, sound, metallic, was rolling forth again and again a question couched in purest Sanskrit:

"Who is there?… Who is there?… Who is there?…"

The hair lifted on his scalp and he swallowed hard in the effort to answer; but the lie stuck in his throat: he was not Rutton and … and it is very hard to lie effectively when you stand in stark darkness with a mouth dry as dust and your hair stirring at the roots because of the intensely impersonal and aloof accents of an inhuman Bell-voice, tolling away out of Nowhere.

"Who is there?"

Again he failed to answer. Somewhere near him he heard a slight noise as of a man moving impatiently; and then a whisper: "Respond, thou fool!"

"Art thou come, O Chosen of the Gateway?" the Bell-voice rang.

"I … I am come," Amber managed to reply. And so still and small sounded his own voice in the huge spaces of the place that he was surprised to find he had been heard.

"Hear ye!" rang the Bell. "Hear ye, O Lords and Rulers in Medhyama! O Children of my Gateway, hear ye well! He is come! He stands upon the threshold of the Gateway!"

Resonant, the echoes of those awe-inspiring tones died upon the stillness, and in response a faint sighing rose and, momentarily growing in volume, became as the roaring of a mighty wind; and suddenly it was abrupted, leaving only a ringing in the ears.

A great drum roared like the crack of Doom; and Amber's jaw dropped. For in the high roof of the temple a six-foot slab had been noiselessly withdrawn, and through it a cold shaft of moonlight fell, cutting the gloom like a gigantic rapier, and smote with its immaculate radiance the true Gateway of Swords.

Not six paces from him it leaped out of the darkness in an iridescent sheen: an arch a scant ten feet in height, and in span double the width of a big man's shoulders, woven across like a weaver's frame with ribbons of pale fire. But the ribbons were of steel—steel blades, sharp, bright, gleaming: a countless array of curved tulwars and crescent scimetars, broad jataghans, short and ugly kukurees, long kutars with straight ends, slender deadly patas, snake-like bichwas; swords with jewelled hilts and engraved and damascened blades; sabres with channels cut from point to guard wherein small pearls ran singing; khands built for service and for parade; swords of every style and period in all the history of India. With their pommels cunningly affixed so that their points touched and interlaced, yet swung free, they lined the piers of the arch from base to span and all the graceful sweep of the intrados, a curtain of shimmering, trembling steel, barring the way to the Mystery beyond. Which was—darkness.

"O ye Swords!" belled the Voice…. "O ye Swords that have known no
dishonour! O ye Swords that have sung in the grasp of my greatest!
Swords of Jehangar, Akbar, Alamgir! Swords of Alludin, Humayun, Shah
Jehan! Swords of Timur-Leng, Arungzeb, Rao Rutton!…"

The invocation seemed interminable. Amber recognised almost every name noted in the annals and legends of Hindustan….

"Hearken, O my Swords! He, thy Chosen, prayeth for entry! What is thy welcome?"

One by one the blades began to shiver, clashing their neighbours, until the curtain of steel glimmered and glistened like phosphorescence in a summer sea, and the place was filled with the music of their contact; and through their clamour boomed the Bell:

"O my Chosen!" Amber started and held himself firmly in hand. "Look well, look well! Here is thy portal to kingship and glory!"

He frowned and took a step forward as if he would throw himself through the archway; for he had suddenly remembered with compelling vividness that Sophia Farrell was to be won only by that passage. But as he moved the swords clattered afresh and swung outwards, presenting a bristle of points. And he stopped, while the Voice, indifferent and remote as always, continued to harangue him.

"If thy heart, O my Chosen, be clean, unsullied with fear and guile; if thy faith be the faith of thy fathers and thy honour rooted in love of thy land; if thou hast faith in the strength of thy hands to hold the reins of Empire … enter, having no fear."

"Trick-work," he told himself. He set his teeth with determination.
"Hope they don't see fit to cut me to pieces on suspicion. Here goes."
He moved forward with a firm step until his bosom all but touched the
points.

Instantaneously, with another clash as of cymbals, the blades were deflected and returned to their first position, closing the way. He hesitated. Then, "That shan't stop me!" he said through his teeth, and pushed forward, heart in mouth. He breasted the curtain and felt it give; the blades yielded jealously, closing round his body like cold caressing arms; he felt their chill kisses on his cheeks and hands, even through his clothing he was conscious of their clinging, deadly touch. Abruptly they swung entirely away, leaving the entrance clear, and he was drawing a free breath when the moon glare showed him the swords returned to position with the speed of light. He jumped for his life and escaped being slashed to pieces by the barest inch. They swung to behind him; and again the drum roared, while afar there arose a furious, eldritch wailing of conches. Overhead the opening disappeared and the light was shut out. In darkness as of the Hall of Eblis the conches were stilled and the echoes ebbed into a silence that held sway for many minutes ere again the Bell spoke.

"Stretch forth thy hand."

Somewhat shaken, Amber held out an open palm before him. A second time the gusty sighing arose and breathed through the night, increasing until the very earth beneath him seemed to rock with the magnitude of the sound, until, at its highest, it ceased and was as if it had not been; not even an echo sang its passing. Then out of nothingness something plopped into Amber's hand and his fingers closed convulsively about it. It was a hand, very small, small as a child's, gnarled and hard as steel and cold as ice.

Amber sunk his teeth into his lower lip and subdued an almost uncontrollable impulse to scream and fling the thing away; for his sense of touch told him that the hand was dead. And yet he became sensible that it was tugging at his own, and he yielded to its persuasion, permitting himself to be led on for so long a journey that his fingers clasping the little hand grew numb with cold ere it was over. He could by no means say whither he was being conducted, but was conscious of a long, gradual descent. Many times he swept his free arm out round him, but touched nothing.

Abruptly the guiding hand was twisted away. He stopped incontinently, and possessed himself with what patience he could muster throughout another long wait tempered by strange sibilant whisperings and rustlings in the void all about him.

Without any forewarning two heavy hands gripped him, one on either shoulder, and he was forced to his knees. At the same instant, with a snapping crackle a spurt of blue flame shot down from the zenith, and where it fell with a thunderclap a dazzling glare of emerald light shot up breasthigh.

To his half-blinded eyes it seemed, for a time, to dance suspended in the air before him. A vapour swirled up from it, a thin cloud, luminous. By degrees he made out its source, a small, brazen bowl on a tripod.

A confusion of hushed voices swelled as had the sound of that mighty, rushing, impalpable wind, and died more slowly.

Conscious that his features were in strong light, he strove to exhibit an impassiveness that belied his temper; then glancing round beneath lowered eyelids he sought to determine something of the nature of his surroundings, but could see little. The hands had left his shoulders the minute his knees touched the floor; he knelt utterly alone in the middle of what seemed to be a vast hall, or cavern, of which the size was but faintly suggested. As his eyes became accustomed to the chiaroscuro he became aware of monstrous images of stone that appeared to advance from and retreat to the far walls on either hand as the green light flared and fell, and of a great silent and motionless concourse of people grouped about the massive pedestals—a crowd as contained and impassive as the gods that towered above its heads, blending into the gloom that shrouded the high roof of the place.

In front of him he could see nothing beyond the noiselessly wavering flame. But presently a hand appeared, as if by magic, above the bowl—a hand, bony, brown, and long of finger, that seemed attached to nothing—and cast something like a powder into the fire. There followed a fizz and puff of vapour, and a strong and heady gust of incense was wafted into Amber's face. Again and again the hand appeared, sprinkling powder in the brazier, until the smoke clouded the atmosphere with its fluent, eddying coils.

The gooseflesh that had pricked out on Amber's skin subsided, and his qualms went with it. "Greek fire burning in a bowl," he explained the phenomenon; "and a native with his arm wrapped to the wrist in black is feeding it. Not a bad effect, though."

It was, perhaps, as well that he had not been deceived, for there was a horror to come that required all his strength to face. He became conscious that something was moving between him and the brazier—something which he had incuriously assumed to be a piece of dirty cloth left there carelessly. But now he saw it stir, squirm, and upend, unfolding itself and lifting its head to the leaping flame: an immense cobra, sleek and white as ivory, its swelling hood as large as a man's two hands, with a binocular mark on it as yellow as topaz, and with vicious eyes glowing like twin rubies in its vile little head.

Amber's breath clicked in his throat and he shrank back, rising; but this instinctive move had been provided against and before his knees were fairly off the rocky floor he was forced down again by the hands on his shoulders. He was unable to take his eyes from the monster, and though terror such as man is heir to lay cold upon his heart, he did not again attempt to stir.

There was now no sound. Alone and undisturbed the bleached viper warmed to its dance with the pulsing flame, turning and twisting, weaving and writhing in its infernal glare….

"Hear ye, O my peoples!"

Amber jumped. The Voice had seemed to ring out from a point directly overhead.

He looked up and discovered above him, vague in the obscurity, the outlines of a gigantic bell, hanging motionless. The green glare, shining on its rim and partly illumining its empty hollow (he saw no clapper) revealed the sheen of the bronze of which it was fashioned.

Out of its immense bowl, the Voice rolled like thunder:

"Hear ye, O my peoples!"

A responsive murmur ascended from the company round the walls:

"We hear! We hear, O Medhyama!"

"Mark well this man, O Children of my Gateway! Mark well! Out of ye all have I chosen him to lead thee in the work of healing; for I thy Mother, I Medhyama, I Bharuta, I the Body from which ye are sprung, call me by whatever name ye know me—I am laid low with a great sickness…. Yea, I am stricken and laid low with a sickness."

A great and bitter wailing arose from the multitude.

"Yea, I am overcome with a faintness, and my strength is gone out from me, and my limbs are as water; I am sick with a fever and languish; in my veins runs the Evil like fire and like poison; and I burn and am stricken; I toss in my torment and murmur, and the sound of my Voice has come to thine ears. Ye have heard me and answered. The tale of my sufferings is known to ye. Say, shall I perish?"

In the brazier the flame leaped high and subsided, and with it the cobra leaped and sank low upon its coils. From the people a mighty shout of negation went up, so that the walls rang with it, and the echoes were bandied back and forth, insensibly decreasing through many minutes. When all was still the Voice began to chant again, and the flames blazed higher and brighter, while the cobra resumed its mystic dance.

Amber knelt on in a semi-stupor, staring glassily at the light and the serpent.

"I, thine old Mother, have called ye together to help in my healing. From my feet to my head I am eaten with pestilence; yea, I am devoured and possessed by the Evil. Even of old was it thus with thy Mother; long since she complained of the Plague that is Scarlet—moaned and cried out and turned in her misery…. But ye failed me. Then my peoples were weaklings and their hearts all were craven; the Scarlet Evil dismayed them; they fled from its power and left it to batten on me in my sickness."

A deep groan welled in uncounted throats and resounded through the cavern.

"Will ye fail me again, O my Children?"

"Nay, nay, O our Mother!"

"Too long have I suffered and been patient in silence. Now must I be cleansed and made whole as of old time; yea, I must be purged altogether and the Evil cast out from me. It is time…. Ye have heard, ye have answered; make ready, for the day of the cleansing approacheth. Whet thy swords for the days of the healing, for my cleansing can be but by steel. Yea, thy swords shall do away with the Evil, and the land shall run red with the blood of Bharuta, the blood of thy Mother; it shall run to the sea as a river, bearing with it the Red Evil. So and no otherwise shall I, thine old Mother, be healed and made whole again."

"Aye, aye, O our Mother!"

The flames, dying, rose once more, and the Voice continued, but with a change of temper. It was now a clarion call, stirring the blood like martial music.

"Ye shall show me your swords for a token…. Swords of the North, are ye ready?"

"We are ready, old Mother!"

With a singing shiver of steel, all around the walls, in knots and clusters, naked blades leaped up, flashing.

"Swords of the East, are ye loyal?"

"Aye, old Mother!"

And the tally of swords was doubled.

"Swords of the South, are ye thirsty?"

A third time the crashing response shattered the echoes.

"Swords of the West, do ye love me?"

With the fourth ringing shout and showing of steel, a silence fell. The walls were veritably hedged with quivering blades, all a-gleam in the ghastly glare of green. Over the sculptured faces of the great idols flickering shadows played, so that they seemed to move and grimace, as if with approbation.

Amber was watching the serpent—dazed and weary as if with a great need of sleep. Even the salvos of shouts came to him as from a great distance. To the clangour of the Bell alone he had become abnormally sensitive; every fibre of his being shuddered, responsive to its weird nuances.

It returned to its solemn and stately intoning.

"Out of ye all have I chosen and fixed upon one who shall lead ye. Through him shall my strength be made manifest, my Will be made known to my peoples. Him must ye serve and obey; to him must ye bow down and be humble. Say, are ye pleased? Will ye have him, my Children?"

Without an instant's delay a cry of ratification rang to the roof. "Yea, O our Mother! Him we will serve and obey, to him bow down and be humble."

The Voice addressed itself directly to the kneeling man. He stiffened and roused.

"Thou hast heard of the honour we confer upon thee—I Medhyama, thy Mother, and these my children, thy brothers. Ye shall lead and shall rule in Bharuta. Are ye ready?"

Half hypnotised, Amber opened his mouth, but no words came. His chin dropped to his breast.

"Thy strength must be known to my peoples; they must see thee put to the proof of thy courage, that they may know thee to be the man for their leader…. Ye are ready?"

He was unable to move a finger.

"Stretch out thine arms!"

He shuddered and tried to obey. The Voice rang imperative.

"Stretch forth thine arms for the testing!"

Somehow, mechanically, he succeeded in raising his arms and holding them rigid before him. Alarmed by the movement, the cobra turned with a hiss, waving his poisonous head. But the Virginian made no offer to withdraw his hands. His eyes were wide and staring and his face livid.

A subdued murmur came from the men clustered round the idols, in semi-darkness.

The Bell boomed forth like an organ.

"O hooded Death…. O Death, who art trained to my service! Thou before whom all men stand affrighted! Thou who canst look into their hearts and read them as a scroll that is unrolled … Look deep into the heart of my Chosen! Judge if he be worthy or wanting, judge if he be false or true … Judge him, O Death!"

Before Amber the great serpent was oscillating like a pendulum, its little tongue playing like forked red lightning, its loathsome red eyes holding his own. Terror gripped his heart, and his soul curdled. He would have cried out, but that his tongue clave to the roof of his mouth. He could not have moved had he willed to.

"Look well, O Death, and judge him!"

The dance of the Hooded Death changed in character, grew more frenzied; the white writhing coils melted into one another in dizzying confusion; figure merged into figure like smoke…. The suspense grew intolerable.

"Hast thou judged him, O Death?"

Instantly the white cobra reared up to its utmost and remained poised over Amber, barely moving save for the almost imperceptible throbbing of the hood and the incessant darting of the forked tongue.

"If he be loyal, then spare him …"

The hood did not move. Amber's flesh crawled with unspeakable dread.

"If he be faithless, then … strike!"

For another moment the cobra maintained the tensity. Then slowly, cruel head waving, hood shrinking, eyes losing their deathly lustre, coil by coil it sank.

A thick murmur ran the round of the walls, swelling into an inarticulate cry, which beat upon Amber's ears like the raving of a far-off surf. From his lips a strangled sob broke, and, every muscle relaxing, he lurched forward.

Alarmed, in a trice the cobra was up again, hood distended to the bursting point, head swinging so swiftly that the eye could not follow it. In another breath would come the final thrust….

A firearm exploded behind Amber, singeing his cheek with its flame. He fell over sideways, barely escaping the head of the cobra, which, with its hood blown to tatters, writhed in convulsions, its malignant tongue straining forth as if in one last attempt to reach his hand.

A second shot followed the first and then a brisk, confused fusillade. Amber heard a man scream out in mortal agony, and the dull sound of a heavy body falling near him; but, coincident with the second report, the brazier had been overturned and its light extinguished as if sucked up into the air.