He led her gently through the passage, and with infinite tenderness lifted her over the rock and into the cavern. When they were come thither, Minos suddenly smacked his thigh, and a short and foolish laugh burst from him. He looked at her, abashed. "What is it that maketh thee to laugh thus and look so strangely?" asked the girl. "Why, lady," he said, shamefacedly, "it did strike upon my mind that every priest in Sardanes hath gone, and there is none left to wed us." A flood of burning color made the face of Memene more lovely still. She covered her hot cheeks with her hands. When she looked up again, she met the troubled gaze of the king with a brave smile. "Thou knowest the words of the ancient ceremony, Minos, dost thou not?" she asked him. "Aye, by rote." "Yonder is wine, and here be lights. Let us say it, each to the other. I think that those who watch from above, seeing how it is with us, shall not greatly blame." Minos stretched a rug on the rock floor and fetched a gleaming ilium flagon, which he set on one of the chests. Then lover and maid knelt before one of the flaring torches with joined hands. Sentence by sentence, they repeated the responses of the quaint old Sardanian marriage rite, through to the "Be thou mine and I thine until our call cometh." They touched the wine with their lips, then rose and passed their hands with fingers locked above the flame of the torch. "My bride!" Minos whispered, and gathered the girl in his arms. The great gray dogs looked on with curious eyes. So were Minos and Memene wed. * * * * * Within a week after the death march of the Sardanian nation, the fires that had lingered in the crater of the Gateway to the Future had passed away, and that hill was cold and still as any in the ring of the valley. On its slopes the grass and herbiage withered, and the snows fell. For a few days the steeps swarmed with goats, the hardy animals outliving the last of the ponies; but they, too, soon died of the cold and starvation. The big bonfires that the people had built around their last camp had long since burned out to ashes. The mantle of darkness that fell over the valley was broken only by the blaze on the hill of Latmos, which Minos tended, laboring mightily, and hewing therefor vast quantities of wood from the stark hymanan forests. The task of bringing the wood up the mountainside through the snow overtaxed even his great strength, if he would have enough to keep his fire big and bright. Leaving three of the younger dogs with the Princess Memene, he took Pallas and the other three, one day, and set off for the storehouse at the outer foothills of the north pass to fetch his sledge. On his way to the pass, he stopped at the Gateway. He climbed the rugged terraces, passed the arch and the spiral pathway, groping his way in the darkness, and once more, and for the last time, stood within the temple of his father's god.