CHAPTER XLV
THE JEWEL HOARD
Men do strange things, at times, when confronted by experiencesentirely outside even the limits of imagination. At sight of theperfectly overwhelming masses of wealth that lay there in square pitschiseled out of the solid gold, most of the Legionaries reacted likemen drunk or mad.
The hoard before them was enough to unbalance reason.
Leclair began to curse with amazing fluency in French and Arabic,while his orderly fell into half-hysterical prayer. Bristol--stolidEnglishman though he was--had to make a strong effort to keep histeeth from chattering. The two Italians, one with an ugly wound onthe jaw, burst out laughing, waving their arms extravagantly. Simondsshouted jubilation and began to jump about in the most extraordinaryfashion. Wallace sat down heavily on the floor, held his lamp out overone of the pits and stared with blank incomprehension.
As for the major, he dropped to his knees, threw down his weapons andplunged his arms up to the elbows in the sliding sparkle of the gems.To have heard him babble, one would have given him free entrance intoany lunatic asylum.
The only two who had remained appreciably calm were "Captain Alden"and the Master. But even they, as fully as all the rest, forgot theimpending menace of attack. For a moment, even their ears were deafto the muffled tumult outside the door, their senses dulled to everyother thing in this world save the incredible hoard there in thegolden pits before them.
Pain, exhaustion, defeat ceased to be, for the Legionaries. Ruin andthe shadow of Azrael's wing departed from their minds. For, bring whatthe future might, the present was offering them a spectacle such asnever before in this world's history had the eyes of white men restedon.
Not even a man _in extremis_ could have turned away his gaze from theunbelievable masses of shimmering wealth in those square pits of gold.
Fairy tales and legends, "Arabian Nights," and all the mystic loreof the East never conjured forth more brain-numbing plenitudes offortune, nor painted more stupefying beauty, than now gleamed up fromthose eight excavations hewn in the dull, soft metal.
"_Nom de Dieu!_" Leclair kept monotonously repeating. "_Mais, nom deDieu!_ Ah, the pigs--ah, the sacred pigs!"
Disjointed words from the others--cries, oaths, jubilations--filledthe low-arched chamber, mingling in the stuffy air with lamp-smoke andthe dull scent of blood and dust and sweat.
Wheezing breath, wordless cries, grunts, strange laughter sounded.And, withal, the major's hands and arms in one of the pits made adry, slithering slide and click as he kneaded, worked, and stirred thegems, dredged up fistfuls and let them rain down crepitantly, again.
The sight was one very hard to grasp with any concrete understanding,harder still to render in cold words. At first, it gave only aconfused impression of colors, like those in some vivid Orientalrug. The details escaped observation; and these changed, too, as theswaying of the lamps, in excited hands, shifted position.
A shimmer of unearthly light played over the pits, like the thin,colored flames at the edge of a driftwood fire. Soft, opalescentgleams were blent with prismatic blues, greens, crimsons. Meltingviolets were stabbed through by hard yellows and penetrant purples.And here an orange flash vied with a delicate old rose; there a richcarnation sparkled beside a misty gray, like fading clouds along thedim horizons of fairyland.
The Master murmured: "It's true, then--partly true. Rrisa knew part ofit!"
"Not all?" asked the woman.
"I hardly think the Caliph el Walid's gold was ever brought to JannatiShahr," he answered. "Coals to Newcastle, you know. And these jewelsare not all uncut. Some are finely faceted, some uncut. But in themain Rrisa spoke the truth. He told what he believed."
"Yes," assented the woman. Then she added: "Spartan simplicity, is itnot? No elaborate coffers. Not even leather sacks. Just bins, like somuch wheat."
"The shining wheat of Araby!"
"Of the whole Orient!"
They fell silent, peering with fixed attention. And gradually somecalm returned to the others. At the door, too, the turmoil had ceased.No doubt the Jannati Shahr men, baffled, had sent for much gunpowderto blow in the massive planking. That silence became ominous.
Still the Legionaries could take no thought of anything but theCaliph el Walid's hoard. As they stood, squatted, or knelt aroundthe pits--pits about two and a half feet square and deeper than thedeepest thrust of any arm--it seemed to them that bottomless lakesand seas of light were opening down, down below them into unfathomeddepths of beauty.
Such beauty caused the soul to drink nepenthes of forgetfulness.Hardships, wounds, blood, pain, menace of death faded under thatspell. That the Legionaries were trapped at the bottom of a vastrabbit-warren, with swarms of Moslem ferrets soon to rush upon them,now seemed to have no significance.
Tranced, "indifferent to Fate," the adventurers peered on greaterwealth of jewels than ever elsewhere in this world's history had beengarnered in one place. The liquid light of the hoard flashed strangeradiances on their tanned, deep-lined faces, now smeared with sweatand dust, with powder-grime and blood. Their eyes were beholdingunutterable rainbows, flashings and burning glows like those of theMoslem's own Jebel Radhwa, or Mountain of Paradise.
Each of these jewels--several million gems, at the leastcomputation--what a story it might have told! What a tale of remotestantiquity, of wild adventures and romance, of love, hate, death! Whata revelation of harem, palace, treasury, of cavern, temple, throne! OfHindu ghat, Egyptian pyramid, Persian garden, Afghan fastness, Chinesepagoda, Burmese minaret! Of enchanted moonlight, blazing sun, dimstarlight! Of passion and of pain!
On what proud hand of Sultan, emir, cadi, prince, had this huge rubyburned? On what beloved breast or brow of princess, nautch-girl,concubine--yes, maybe of slave exalted to the purple--had thatfire-gleaming diamond blazed?
From Roman times, from Greek, from ancient Jerusalem, from thefire-breathing shrines of Baal at long-dead Carthage, perhaps, thistopaz might have come. This sapphire might have graced the anklet ofsome beauty of old Nile, ages before King Solomon wielded the scepter,ages even before the great god Osiris reigned.
That amethyst might have been loot of the swift black galleys of Tyre,in joyous days when men's strong arms took what they could, of womenor of gems, and when Power was Law!
Imagination ran riot there, gazing down upon those jewel-pits. In themlay every kind of precious stone for which, from remotest antiquity,men had cheated, schemed, lied, fought, murdered. The jewels showedno attempt at sorting or classification. With true Oriental_laissez-faire_, they were all mingled quite at random; these gems,any chance handfuls of which must have meant an incalculable fortune.