Page:Weird Tales volume 30 number 01.djvu/92

 of ancient tombs. All myths—only lies and myths." The silvery voice rose higher. "But the pit of Karamour is no myth, nor does Atma lie when she says your lashed bodies will be lowered to the hungry inmates of its bottom if you fail your Princess!"

The blacks shifted nervously but said no words, while I could but look in amazement at the fearless beauty who spoke so scornfully of the gods and legends she had been reared to respect and fear.

"But this hidden tomb of which you speak," I asked. "Where is it, and whose sarcophagus lies within?"

The girl pointed upward.

"A most unusual place for a most unusual ruler," she replied. "Lying on the summit of this great boulder is a flat rock that, once removed, will reveal an opening within. Descending, we will follow a long corridor to a gilded door, behind which lie the riches and preserved body of Balkis, Queen of Sheba!"

This, then, was where the famed treasure of antiquity lay hidden; the fabulous wealth that for thirty centuries, in legend and in song, had lured adventurous spirits from the far-off corners of the earth, and caused the hot sands to be littered with their bleaching bones.

"Out here, so far from her homeland?" Atma nodded.

"Awaiting her restoration, as promised by Karamour. Awaiting that which can never be. But come—time passes. We must ascend the boulder."

There was a noticeable lack of enthusiasm among the blacks, but finally a tall, muscular fellow hesitantly volunteered the climb, and after several attempts, succeeded in reaching the summit. Once there, he threw down an end of the long rope he had carried, and by means of this crude ladder we at last stood on the high peak.

Now the fiat rock was dislodged to show a gaping pit beneath. Again we adhered to the slender rope, and leaving a sentinel to guard the summit, with flaming torches the four intruders stood in the age-old corridors of Balkis. Holding high the feeble lights we groped our way through the blackness. Down a long hall that had been hewn in the living rock, a mighty passageway untrodden for over thirty centuries, we slowly advanced, and the grotesque carvings that showed in the gloom appeared as the angry eyes of the departed.

To think that within these winding halls had once been carried the body of her who had borne a child to Solomon; that the long-dead hands which had hewn this forgotten vault might have been raised in salute to David. Twice we passed the silent blackness of intersecting corridors, and once stepped carefully over the grisly remains of a faithful guard, beside whose moldering body lay a sword that could well have been the one called for by the great Jewish King in his judgment of the two sorrowing mothers and the child. Along the rocky floor were deep deposits of dust, an indication that the passage had long been unused. The granite sides converged as they rose to the top of the shaft some ten feet above us. Securely hidden in the very bowels of the earth below that lonely valley, the silent corridors had escaped the ravages of countless treasure-hunters as well as the many tomb-robbers of antiquity. The great Queen had been most cautious in selecting the vault for her riches. Atma had told how, at Karamour's orders, the slaves who had hewn the pass were slain by soldiers, who, in a like manner, were also slaughtered that none might know the resting-place of Sheba.