chariots,
and it was in this chest, Jarvo told them, that the Hereditary
Treasure had been kept. The chamber walls were covered with
bas-reliefs in the ill-proportioned and careful carving of the
Phoenician artists not yet under Greek influence, and all about were
set the wonderful bronzes, such as Tyrian artificers made for the
Temple. The other chambers gave still deeper utterance to days
remote, for it was there that the king's library had been collected
in case after case, filled with parchment rolls preserved and copied
from age to age. What might not be there, they wondered--annals,
State documents, the Phoenician originals of histories preserved
elsewhere only in fragments of translation or utterly lost, the
secrets of science and magic known to men the very forms of whose
names have perished; and not only the longed-for poems of Sido and
Jopas, but of who could tell how many singing hearts, lyric with joy
and love and still voiceful here in these strange halls? These were
chambers such as no one has ever entered, for this was the vexing of
no unviolated tomb and no buried city, but the actual return to the
Past, watching lonely on the mountain.

"Clusium," said Amory softly. "I had actually wanted to go to the
cemetery at Clusium, to see some inscriptions!"

"No, you didn't, Toby," said St. George pleasantly, "you wanted to
go somewhere and you called it Clusium. You wanted an adventure and
you thought Clusium was the name of it."

"I know," said Amory shamelessly, "and there are no end of names for
it. But it's always the same thing. _Excepting this_."

"Excepting this," St. George repeated fervently as they turned to
go; and if, in singing of that morning, the rollicking wind sang
that, it must have breathed and trembled with a chorus of faint
voices from every shelf in the room,--voices that of old had
thrilled with the same meaning and woke now to the eternal echo.

Woke now to the eternal echo--an echo that touched delicately
through the events of that afternoon and laid strange values on all
that happened. Otherwise, if they four were not all a little
echo-mad, how was it that in the shadow of doubt, in the face of
danger, and near the inextinguishable mystery they yet found time
for the little, wing-like moments that never hold history, because
they hold revelation. There were, too, some events; but an event is
a clumsy thing at best, unless it has something intangible about it.
The delicious momen