t of mind. But no amount of beauty or refinement
could have made an entanglement between Good and herself a desirable
occurrence; for, as she herself put it, "Can the sun mate with the
darkness, or the white with the black?"

I need hardly state that we never again penetrated into Solomon's
treasure chamber. After we had recovered from our fatigues, a process
which took us forty-eight hours, we descended into the great pit in the
hope of finding the hole by which we had crept out of the mountain, but
with no success. To begin with, rain had fallen, and obliterated our
spoor; and what is more, the sides of the vast pit were full of
ant-bear and other holes. It was impossible to say to which of these we
owed our salvation. Also, on the day before we started back to Loo, we
made a further examination of the wonders of the stalactite cave, and,
drawn by a kind of restless feeling, even penetrated once more into the
Chamber of the Dead. Passing beneath the spear of the White Death we
gazed, with sensations which it would be quite impossible for me to
describe, at the mass of rock that had shut us off from escape,
thinking the while of priceless treasures beyond, of the mysterious old
hag whose flattened fragments lay crushed beneath it, and of the fair
girl of whose tomb it was the portal. I say gazed at the "rock," for,
examine as we could, we could find no traces of the join of the sliding
door; nor, indeed, could we hit upon the secret, now utterly lost, that
worked it, though we tried for an hour or more. It is certainly a
marvellous bit of mechanism, characteristic, in its massive and yet
inscrutable simplicity, of the age which produced it; and I doubt if
the world has such another to show.

At last we gave it up in disgust; though, if the mass had suddenly
risen before our eyes, I doubt if we should have screwed up courage to
step over Gagool's mangled remains, and once more enter the treasure
chamber, even in the sure and certain hope of unlimited diamonds. And
yet I could have cried at the idea of leaving all that treasure, the
biggest treasure probably that in the world's history has ever been
accumulated in one spot. But there was no help for it. Only dynamite
could force its way through five feet of solid rock.

So we left it. Perhaps, in some remote unborn century, a more fortunate
explorer may hit upon the "Open Sesame," and flood the world with gems.
But, myself, I doubt it. Somehow, I seem to feel that the