The scream had awakened slow steps that now came towards the travellers, down corridors, as it sounded, of stone.  And then chains fell on stone and the door of oak was opened by some one older than what man hopes to come to, with small, peaked lips as those of some woodland thing.

“Senores,” the old one said, “the Professor welcomes you.”

They stood and stared at his age, and Morano blurted uncouthly what both of them felt.  “You are old, grandfather,” he said.

“Ah, Senores,” the old man sighed, “the Professor does not allow me to be young.  I have been here years and years but he never allowed it.  I have served him well but it is still the same.  I say to him, ‘Master, I have served you long ...’ but he interrupts me for he will have none of youth.  Young servants go among the villages, he says.  And so, and so ...”

“You do not think your master can give you youth!” said Rodriguez.

The old man knew that he had talked too much, voicing that grievance again of which even the rocks were weary.  “Yes,” he said briefly, and bowed and led the way into the house.  In one of the corridors running out of the hall down which he was leading silently, Rodriguez overtook that old man and questioned him to his face.

“Who is this professor?” he said.

By the light of a torch that spluttered in an iron clamp on the wall Rodriguez questioned him with these words, and Morano with his wondering, wistful eyes.  The old man halted and turned half round, and lifted his head and answered.  “In the University of Saragossa,” he said with pride, “he holds the Chair of Magic.”

Even the names of Oxford or Cambridge, Harvard or Yale or Princeton, move some respect, and even yet in these unlearned days.  What wonder then that the name of Saragossa heard on that lonely mountain awoke in Rodriguez some emotion of reverence and even awed Morano.  As for the Chair of Magic, it was of all the royal endowments of that illustrious University the most honoured and dreaded.

“At Saragossa!” Rodriguez muttered.

“At Saragossa,” the old man affirmed.

Between that ancient citadel of learning and this most savage mountain appeared a gulf scarce to be bridged by thought.

“The Professor rests in his mountain,” the old man said, “because of a conjunction of the stars unfavourable to study, and his class have gone to their homes for many weeks.”  He bowed again and led on along that corridor of dismal stone.  The others followed, and still as Rodriguez went that famous name Saragossa echoed within his mind.

And then they came to a door set deep in the stone, and their guide opened it and they went in; and there was the Professor in a mystical hat and a robe of dim purple, seated with his back to them at a table, studying the ways of the stars.  “Welcome, Don Rodriguez,” said the Professor before he turned round; and then he rose, and with small steps backwards and sideways and many bows, he displayed all those formulae of politeness that Saragossa knew in the golden age and which her professors loved to execute.  In later years they became more elaborate still, and afterwards were lost.