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shoulders. And the gem’s fallen out of it.”
    He replaced the great glowing gem himself, nodding approval.
    “It’s worth a room-full of slaves, itself alone. Here, put your skirt back on. It’s torn down the side, but the priests will never notice it. Wipe your face. A goddess doesn’t cry like a whipped schoolgirl. By Crom, you
do
look like Yelaya, face, hair, figure and all. If you act the goddess with the priests as well as you did with me, you’ll fool them easily.”
    “I’ll try,” she shivered.
    “Good; I’m going to find Zargheba.”
    At that she became panicky again.
    “No! Don’t leave me alone! This place is haunted!”
    “There’s nothing here to harm you,” he assured her impatiently. “Nothing but Zargheba, and I’m going to look after him. I’ll be back shortly. I’ll be watching from close by in case anything goes wrong during the ceremony; but if you play your part properly, nothing will go wrong.”
    And turning, he hastened out of the oracle chamber; behind him Muriela squeaked wretchedly at his going. Twilight had fallen. The great rooms and halls were shadowy and indistinct; copper friezes glinted dully through the dusk. Conan strode like a silent phantom through the great halls, with a sensation as of being stared at from the shadowed recesses by invisible ghosts of the past. No wonder the girl was nervous amid such surroundings.
    He glided down the marble steps like a slinking panther, sword in hand. Silence reigned over the valley, and above the rim of the cliffs stars were blinking out. If the priests of Keshia had entered the valley there was not a sound, not a movement in the greenery to betray them. He made out the ancient broken-paved avenue, wandering away to the south, lost amid clustering masses of fronds and thick-leaved bushes. He followed it warily, hugging the edge of the paving where the shrubs massed their shadows thick, until he saw ahead of him, dimly in the dusk, the clump of lotus-trees, the strange growth peculiar to the black lands of Kush. There, according to the girl, Zargheba should be lurking. Conan became stealth personified. A velvet-footed shadow he melted into the thickets.
    He approached the lotus grove by a circuitous movement, and scarcely the rustle of a leaf proclaimed his passing. At the edge of the trees he halted suddenly, crouched like a suspicious panther among the deep shrubs. Ahead of him, among the dense leaves, showed a pallid oval, dim in the uncertain light. It might have been one of the great white blossoms which shone thickly among the branches. But Conan knew that it was a man’s face. And it was turned toward him. He shrank quickly deeper into the shadows. Had Zargheba seen him? The man was looking directly toward him. Seconds passed. That dim face had not moved. Conan could make out the dark tuft below that was the short black beard.
    And suddenly Conan was aware of something unnatural. Zargheba, he knew, was not a tall man. Standing erect his head would scarcely top the Cimmerian’s shoulder. Yet that face was on a level with Conan’s own. Was the man standing on something? Conan bent and peered toward the ground below the spot where the face showed, but his vision was blocked by undergrowth and the thick boles of the trees. But he saw something else, and he stiffened. Through a slot in the underbrush he glimpsed the stem of the tree under which, apparently, Zargheba was standing. The face was directly in line with that tree. He should have seen below that face, not the tree-trunk, but Zargheba’s body – but there was no body there.
    Suddenly tenser than a tiger who stalks its prey, Conan glided deeper into the thicket, and a moment later drew aside a leafy branch and glared at the face that had not moved. Nor would it ever move again, of its own volition. He looked on Zargheba’s severed head, suspended from the branch of the tree by its own long black hair.

III
    THE RETURN OF THE ORACLE
    Conan wheeled supply, sweeping the