word light or heavy, according to your minds?  Well do ye know it, ye Wicked Ones.  But ye are all evil—­evil to the core—­the wickedness bubbles up in you like a fountain in the spring-time.  Were it not for me, generations since had ye ceased to be, for of your own evil way had ye destroyed each other.  And now, because ye have done this thing, because ye have striven to put these men, my guests, to death, and yet more because ye have dared to disobey my word, this is the doom that I doom you to.  That ye be taken to the cave of torture,[*] and given over to the tormentors, and that on the going down of to-morrow’s sun those of you who yet remain alive be slain, even as ye would have slain the servant of this my guest.”

[*] “The cave of torture.”  I afterwards saw this dreadful place, also a legacy from the prehistoric people who lived in Kor.  The only objects in the cave itself were slabs of rock arranged in various positions to facilitate the operations of the torturers.  Many of these slabs, which were of a porous stone, were stained quite dark with the blood of ancient victims that had soaked into them.  Also in the centre of the room was a place for a furnace, with a cavity wherein to heat the historic pot.  But the most dreadful thing about the cave was that over each slab was a sculptured illustration of the appropriate torture being applied.  These sculptures were so awful that I will not harrow the reader by attempting a description of them.—­L.  H. H.

She ceased, and a faint murmur of horror ran round the cave.  As for the victims, as soon as they realised the full hideousness of their doom, their stoicism forsook them, and they flung themselves down upon the ground, and wept and implored for mercy in a way that was dreadful to behold.  I, too, turned to Ayesha, and begged her to spare them, or at least to mete out their fate in some less awful way.  But she was hard as adamant about it.

“My Holly,” she said, again speaking in Greek, which, to tell the truth, although I have always been considered a better scholar of the language than most men, I found it rather difficult to follow, chiefly because of the change in the fall of the accent.  Ayesha, of course, talked with the accent of her contemporaries, whereas we have only tradition and the modern accent to guide us as to the exact pronunciation.  “My Holly, it cannot be.  Were I to show mercy to those wolves, your lives would not be safe among this people for a day.  Thou knowest them not.  They are tigers to lap blood, and even now they hunger for your lives.  How thinkest thou that I rule this people?  I have but a regiment of guards to do my bidding, therefore it is not by force.  It is by terror.  My empire is of the imagination.  Once in a generation mayhap I do as I have done but now, and slay a score by torture.  Believe not that I would be cruel, or take vengeance on anything so low.  What can it profit me to be avenged on such as these?  Those who live long, my Holly,