When the World Shook: Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley, and Arbuthnot by H. Rider Haggard

Author:H. Rider Haggard
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Science fiction, Adventure stories
Publisher: Standard Ebooks
Published: 2023-04-10T19:02:32+00:00

Ceas­ing from melody, he ad­ded:

“I de­term­ined that I would drink noth­ing in­tox­ic­at­ing while I was on this is­land that I might be a shin­ing light in a dark place, and now I fear that quite un­wit­tingly I have broken what I look upon as a prom­ise.”

Then he, too, grew si­lent.

“Come,” said Yva, “my fath­er, the Lord Oro, awaits you.”

We crossed the court of the Wa­ter of Life and moun­ted steps that led to a wide and im­press­ive por­tico, Tommy frisk­ing ahead of us in a most ex­cited way for a dog of his ex­per­i­ence. Evid­ently the wa­ter had pro­duced its ef­fect upon him as well as upon his mas­ters. This por­tico was in a sol­emn style of ar­chi­tec­ture which I can­not de­scribe, be­cause it differed from any oth­er that I know. It was not Egyp­tian and not Greek, al­though its solid­ity re­minded me of the former, and the beauty and grace of some of the columns, of the lat­ter. The pro­fuse­ness and rather grot­esque char­ac­ter of the carvings sug­ges­ted the ru­ins of Mex­ico and Yu­catan, and the enorm­ous size of the blocks of stone, those of Peru and Baal­bec. In short, all the known forms of an­cient ar­chi­tec­ture might have found their in­spir­a­tion here, and the gen­er­al ef­fect was tre­mend­ous.

“The palace of the King,” said Yva, “where­of we ap­proach the great hall.”

We entered through mighty met­al doors, one of which stood ajar, in­to a ves­ti­bule which from cer­tain in­dic­a­tions I gathered had once been a guard, or per­haps an as­sembly-room. It was about forty feet deep by a hun­dred wide. Thence she led us through a smal­ler door in­to the hall it­self. It was a vast place without columns, for there was no roof to sup­port. The walls of marble or lime­stone were sculp­tured like those of Egyp­tian temples, ap­par­ently with battle scenes, though of this I am not sure for I did not go near to them. Ex­cept for a broad av­en­ue along the middle, up which we walked, the area was filled with marble benches that would, I pre­sume, have ac­com­mod­ated sev­er­al thou­sand people. But they were empty—empty, and oh! the loneli­ness of it all.

Far away at the head of the hall was a dais en­closed, and, as it were, roofed in by a tower­ing struc­ture that mingled grace and majesty to a won­der­ful de­gree. It was mod­elled on the pat­tern of a huge shell. The base of the shell was the plat­form; be­hind were the ribs, and above, the over­hanging lip of the shell. On this plat­form was a throne of sil­very met­al. It was sup­por­ted on the arched coils of snakes, where­of the tails formed the back and the heads the arms of the throne.

On this throne, ar­rayed in gor­geous robes, sat the Lord Oro, his white beard flow­ing over them, and a jew­elled cap upon his head. In front of him was a low table on which lay graven sheets of met­al, and among them a large ball of crys­tal.

There he sat, sol­emn and si­lent

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