How they had ever raised those massive blocks of stone to that great height no one can guess unless, indeed, Amory's theory were correct and the palace had originally been built upon level ground and had had its surroundings blasted neatly away to make a mountain.

At all events there were the walls of the great airy rooms made of the naked stone, exquisitely beveled and chiseled, and frescoed with the planetary deities--Eloti, the Moon with her chariot drawn by white bulls, the Sun and his four horses, with his emblem of a column in the form of a rising flame--types taken from the heavens and from the abyss.

There were roofs of sound fir and sweet cedar, carven cornices, cave-like window embrasures with no glass, and little circular rooms built about shrines in which sat broken images of Baal the sun god, of a sandaled Astarte, and a ravening Melkarth, with the lion's skin.
From a great upper corridor there went a stairway, each deep step of which was placed on the back of a stone lion of increasing size, until the tallest lion's head extended close to the painted ceiling, and there were comfortable benches cut in his gigantic paws.

Many of the rooms were without furnishing, some were filled with vague, splendid stuff mouldering away, and others with most luxuriously-devised ministries to beauty and comfort.

The palace was curiously and wonderfully an habitation of more than two thousand years ago, furnished with a taste and luxury in advance of this moment's civilization of the world.