The fanciful story, the fabulous antiquity claimed for the palace before her, increased the sense of unreality and mystery filling Una's mind as she listened to Narva. The story itself was not unlike others of the kind, handed down from one generation to another, explaining the origin of some ancient South American race. In the telling of it Narva, for the first time, forgot her reserve, and her simple eloquence, her apparent belief in the quaint old fable she was telling, added greatly to its impressiveness. And there stood the great palace before her, with its flying condor guarding forever the descendants of that mythical old zipa! Una was unable to go back in imagination to that primeval past, especially as it had to do with a country and a people of which she knew nothing. But the tale itself, and the grace and beauty of the palace about which it had been woven, reminded her of much that she had heard and read in other than Indian mythology and literature. Pageants from medieval legend, with their phantom castles in haunted forests, engaged her fancy as she listened. For the moment she half expected to see a troop of Arthurian knights, intent upon some mystic quest, issue forth from the stately portal, bringing with them a flash of vivid light and movement that as yet the picture lacked. A zipa she had never seen, had never heard of before--and even a condor filled a place in her imagination that was not much more real than that occupied by the roc, the giant bird of the Arabian tales. But neither Christian knight nor pagan zipa was here. The silence, now that Narva had finished her tale, was profound. The murmur of voices, distinctly heard a short time before, was lost in the distance. The apparent isolation of a building so rich in possibilities of usefulness, so well preserved architecturally, was its most inexplicable feature. Una was almost persuaded that the palace before her was uninhabited, abandoned. If it belonged, as Narva said, to the dim past of a vanished race, it stood now merely as a monument to forgotten greatness. Or--did it still serve as a refuge, a protection, to the descendants of that condor-born zipa of Narva's legend?