bored a single, luminous pathway.  But right ahead, looming and wavering, seen for an instant, lost again when a deep vibration stirred and swayed the water, shone the faintly golden shape of a great portal.  Acuma I had lost sight of, but I had no need to ask him what lay before me.  The wild pounding of my heart told me that I stood at the gateway of the city that had been covered a thousand thousand years ago by the unheeding sea.  Leaning at an angle against the tide, I struggled forward till the great gate towered above me, its arch half lost in the green, swimming shadow of the water.  But as I flashed my light up across its pillars, it answered with the shifting sparkle of gems crusted thick upon it.

I walked then, breathless, into a street paved with rough silver ingots, each one surely weighing a quintal, between tremulous shapes of buildings which pointed lustrous towers upward through fathoms of green water.  It was many minutes before I dared enter one of those great silent halls.  Dragging my heavy leaden-soled boots, I pushed through a shapely silver doorway, and a fish darted past me as I entered.  Who could imagine the wonder of that vast room!  The mosaic that covered the walls and ceilings was of gold and jewels, not porphyry and serpentine, such as delight the wondering visitor to Venice, but precious stones—­rubies, sapphires, emeralds, amethysts as richly purple as grape clusters, topaz as clear and mellow as honey.

Behind a traceried grillwork lay heaped a mound of treasures such as no human eye will ever see again.  I lifted a little tree fashioned all of gold,—­each leaf wrought of the metal—­and strung with jewelled fruits on which ruby-eyed golden birds fed.  In despairing rapture I clutched after a neck ornament hung with pendulous pearls as large as plums.  But as I reached for it, I felt that something was looking at me from the corner.  Not Acuma; no human being was in sight.  Peering out through the glass visor of my helmet, I saw fixed on me from low down beside the doorway two inky, moveless eyes as large as saucers.  They were not human eyes, nor did they belong to any sea creature I had ever beheld or read of.  They were round and fixed, pools of bottomless blackness, staring at me through two varas of clear, swaying water.  I took an uncertain step backwards, and as I did so I felt something soft and heavy laid slowly and slimily upon my shoulder....

Ah me, here is an interruption!  A native child approaches, bearing as an offering a Lol Ipop (one of the native fruits).  Just before he reaches me he falls face down, doubtless out of respect for my gray hairs, and, on arising, proffers me the Lol Ipop, now coated with sand.  In this state I am expected to eat it, and, being in great awe and fear of the inhabitants, I proceed to do so, which incapacitates me for further epistolatory effort.

  So, till I recover from the effects of my enforced meal,
  believe me your devoted correspondent,