thou canst go alive by the way that thou
hast entered it, the lesser Kings will be thy servants!"

"Again the trail is lost," said Mowgli coolly. "Can any jackal have
burrowed so deep and bitten this great White Hood? He is surely mad.
Father of Cobras, I see nothing here to take away."

"By the Gods of the Sun and Moon, it is the madness of death upon the
boy!" hissed the Cobra. "Before thine eyes close I will allow thee this
favour. Look thou, and see what man has never seen before!"

"They do not well in the Jungle who speak to Mowgli of favours," said
the boy, between his teeth; "but the dark changes all, as I know. I will
look, if that please thee."

He stared with puckered-up eyes round the vault, and then lifted up from
the floor a handful of something that glittered.

"Oho!" said he, "this is like the stuff they play with in the Man-Pack:
only this is yellow and the other was brown."

He let the gold pieces fall, and move forward. The floor of the vault
was buried some five or six feet deep in coined gold and silver that had
burst from the sacks it had been originally stored in, and, in the long
years, the metal had packed and settled as sand packs at low tide. On it
and in it and rising through it, as wrecks lift through the sand, were
jewelled elephant-howdahs of embossed silver, studded with plates of
hammered gold, and adorned with carbuncles and turquoises. There were
palanquins and litters for carrying queens, framed and braced with
silver and enamel, with jade-handled poles and amber curtain-rings;
there were golden candlesticks hung with pierced emeralds that quivered
on the branches; there were studded images, five feet high, of forgotten
gods, silver with jewelled eyes; there were coats of mail, gold inlaid
on steel, and fringed with rotted and blackened seed-pearls; there
were helmets, crested and beaded with pigeon's-blood rubies; there were
shields of lacquer, of tortoise-shell and rhinoceros-hide, strapped
and bossed with red gold and set with emeralds at the edge; there were
sheaves of diamond-hilted swords, daggers, and hunting-knives; there
were golden sacrificial bowls and ladles, and portable altars of a shape
that never sees the light of day; there were jade cups and bracelets;
there were incense-burners, combs, and pots for perfume, henna, and
eye-powder, all in embossed gold; there were nose-rings, armlets,
head-bands, finger-rings, and girdles past any counting; there were
belts, sev