Its light fell on a circle of skeletons, all perfect, each with its head toward a brass bowl in the center.

“Ugh!” growled Tom Tripe.  “Those are the ghosts that dig o’ nights!  Go smell ’em, Trotters!  Are they the enemy?”

The dog sniffed the bones, but slunk away again uninterested.

“Nothing doing!” laughed Dick.  “You haven’t laid the ghost yet, Tom!”

“Have you got your pistols with you?” Tom retorted, patting his own jacket to show the bulge of one beneath it.

“Those,” said Yasmini, standing between the skeletons and holding up her own light, “are the bones of priests, who died when the secret of the place was taken from them!  My father told me they were left to starve to death.  This was Jinendra’s temple.”

“D’you suppose they pulled that cut stone from the walls, trying to force a way out?” Dick hazarded.  “The lid of the hole we came down through is a foot thick, and was set solid in cement; they couldn’t have lifted that if they tried for a week.  Everything’s solid in this place.  I sounded every inch of the floor with a cannon ball, but it’s all hard underneath.”

“I would have gone straight to the image of Jinendra,” said Yasmini.  “Jinendra smiles and keeps his secrets so well that I should have suspected him at once!”

“I went to that last,” Dick answered.  “It looks so like a piece of high relief carved out of the rock wall.  As a matter of fact, though, it’s about six tons of quartz with a vein of gold in it—­see the gold running straight up the line of the nose and over the middle of the head?—­I pried it away from the wall at last with steel wedges, and there’s just room to squeeze in behind it.  Beyond that is another wall that I had to cut through with a chisel.  Who goes in first?”

“Who looks for gold finds gold!” Yasmini quoted.  “The vein of gold you have been mining was the clue to the secret all along.”

She would have led the way, but Utirupa stopped her.

“If there is danger,” he said, “it is my place to lead.”

But nobody would permit that, Yasmini least of all.

“Shall Samson choose a new maharajah so soon as all that?” she laughed.

“Let the dog go first!” Tom proposed.  Trotters was sniffing at the dark gap behind Jinendra’s image, with eyes glaring and a low rumbling growl issuing from between bared teeth.  But Trotters would not go.

Finally, in the teeth of remonstrances from Tess, Dick cocked a pistol and, with his lantern in the other hand, strode in boldly.  Trotters followed him, and Tom Tripe next.  Then Utirupa.  Then the women.

Nothing happened.  The passage was about ten feet long and a yard wide.  They squeezed one at a time through the narrow break Dick had made in the end of it, into a high, pitch-dark cave that smelt unexplainably of wood-smoke, Dick standing just inside the gap to bold the lantern for them and help them through—­continuing to stand there after Tess had entered last.