palace festival hall was a blaze of light as the prisoners were ushered in. Its tables were arranged in a wide U, and the diners had apparently rearranged their places in expectation of something to come. Ru sat by the side of Rana, and back of them were ranged the priests of Minos. The guard was heavily disposed inside the door.
Morse looked around, first for Kiron and then for Laidlaw, but both men were absent.
Morse and Leola had been placed upon their feet outside the entrance, their lower bonds loosened in order that they might walk, and then forced into the dining hall by their captors. Rana regarded them with the eyes of a basilisk, and Ru with more complacency but none the less assurance.
"So, my sister," said Rana fiercely, "it seems that you are more human than we thought. You—the woman who styled the other sex stupid—have succumbed to the seduction of a stranger."
Leola surveyed the queen calmly, as if she had not spoken, and Ru took up the denunciation.
"Priestess of Pasiphae, you are forsworn," he said, and the nobles about the tables craned their necks to listen. "The fire mountain shows the anger of the gods. The lake itself is an emblem of their growing wrath. We have consulted the oracles with anxious questionings, and they have answered."
In the silence that fell upon the hall as Ru paused, the heavy breathing of the audience betrayed their fear and superstition. Ru looked at them with the air of an animal trainer who had been doubtful whether his performers had forgotten their tricks, but now he knew that they were held well in hand.
"The oracle has said: 'From fire and water was Atlantis born. When fire and water mingle, then the beginning shall be the end. Watch carefully, lest destruction come from without. Desert not the gods, lest in time of peril they in turn desert you.'
When fire and water mingle!' The lake will soon begin to boil unless the danger can be averted. Vapor hangs over it tonight—vapor born of the mingling of the elements. 'Watch carefully, lest destruction come from without.' Within our midst, in the very center of our age-old worship of the eternal gods—Leola has been unfaithful to her vows, a priestess who has flouted the gods and made a mockery of them before their own altars!"
A muttering broke out along the line of tables. Rana alone said nothing, but she bent a venomous gaze upon her sister who looked through her as if she had not been present.
"From the outside have come strangers with talk of peoples who are so much more powerful than Atlantis. If they are so great and wise, why do they come to spy upon us? Why are they not content to remain in their own land as we are in Atlantis? Yet, we would have treated them courteously, but they have conspired with this recreant priestess to pollute our sacred shrines. Their penalty must be death!"
The mutterings grew louder, but under Ru's piercing stare no one dared show signs of dissent.
"And simple death cannot atone for, nor avert, the gathering displeasure of the gods. Sacrifice alone will appease them!"
A slight tremor rocked the building, and the lamps swung on the chains that supported them. Ru's eyes blazed with triumph.
"See!" he cried. "The gods answer and accept!"
The mutterings changed to audible exclamations of awe and wonder. Into the faces of the nobles, men and women alike, crept the look that they had worn in the amphitheater. Their eyes hardened and their mouths grew cruel. There had been no human sacrifices in Atlantis for some time; it would be a rare spectacle.
"The false priestess shall stand upon the Spot of Sacrifice while Re touches with his shining finger the rays of his emblem," said Ru. "As for the stranger, let him learn the embrace of the Bull of Minos."
Morse, wondering what horrors might lie in the fate decreed for Leola, dimly sensed what his own would be. He knew the ancient torture of the Minoans described in the frescoes of Cnossus, where strangers were "presented" to the bull, shut up within the belly of a brazen image made red-hot to receive them. Doomed and without hope as he believed them, strangely, death seemed far away, unfathomable. His mind was misty, and idly, without feeling, he wondered what they would do to Laidlaw, and if the scientist had already been condemned.
Dimly he heard the thrill, almost the pleasure, in the tones of the nobles as they repeated: "The Bull of Minos!"
He turned to Leola, and her eyes held an open avowal of love before they saddened to farewell.
"Forgive me," he said hoarsely. The mist was clearing from his mind as the hands of the guards took hold of him.