Wallace sat down heavily on the floor, held his lamp out over
one of the pits and stared with blank incomprehension.
As for the major, he dropped to his knees, threw down his weapons and
plunged 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 into
any 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 the
impending menace of attack. For a moment, even their ears were deaf
to the muffled tumult outside the door, their senses dulled to every
other thing in this world save the incredible hoard there in the
golden pits before them.
Pain, exhaustion, defeat ceased to be, for the Legionaries. Ruin and
the shadow of Azrael's wing departed from their minds. For, bring what
the future might, the present was offering them a spectacle such as
never before in this world's history had the eyes of white men rested
on.
Not even a man _in extremis_ could have turned away his gaze from the
unbelievable masses of shimmering wealth in those square pits of gold.
Fairy tales and legends, "Arabian Nights," and all the mystic lore
of the East never conjured forth more brain-numbing plenitudes of
fortune, nor painted more stupefying beauty, than now gleamed up from
those eight excavations hewn in the dull, soft metal.
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