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 CHAPTER XII

DEFEAT THAT CROWNS A VICTORY

", tell me all."

She issued her command to the man who, in an hour, had sprung from obscurity to become the leader of the people, with the same calm assurance, the same air of unquestioned superior- ity, that she had used to Chun, the unknown Sudra. For a moment, surprise and disappoint- ment, and a dull, resentful pain, more bitter than disappointment, held him dumb.

They were not hiding in the shadows, as of old, but instead were sitting in the moonlight outside the central portals of the upper temple of Angkor Wat.

At their feet, the abrupt mass of masonry, which is the immense plinth whereon the temple stands, fell in a precipitous descent, sheer to the courtyard eighty feet below them, scaled in three places by perilous stairways. The courtyard, blocked in one spot by the guard-houses, no longer tenanted by Brahmans, was plunged deep in shadow; but beyond it rose the walls and arched roofs of the inner cloisters, which almost