"You shall really see him as I promised," said the old man, and making a trumpet of his hands he called out "Yohann! Yohann!" in a remarkably sonorous voice. Immediately there appeared from the lodge beneath the gate a sentry at whose girdle dangled two large keys. He came up to them and saluted, but made no remark, and in silence they all three went across the gardens to the vast loopholed wall opposite the gate. The sentry opened an insignificant little door half hidden in the wallflowers that dangled from the crevices between the mighty stones. "The walls are thicker than you supposed, are they not, my lord?" said the tattered guide. Norman gasped with astonishment. A huge corridor pierced the wall from side to side and top to bottom,--a corridor at least a hundred feet long and eighty feet high, yet only of a breadth for three men to walk side by side and lit only by a tiny window at the extreme end. Norman having walked over to it saw that the window commanded a sweeping view of the plain of Alsander, the river Ianthe, the sea, the mountains, and also noted that no one could look in through that window whoever might look out, for the wall on that side is built on the top of a sheer precipice of rock. Meanwhile the second key was being applied to another small door half-way down the corridor on the left. It opened groaning; the centre of the corridor was flooded with a shaft of light. "Enter, my lord," said the mysterious guide. "This is the throne-room." It was a most presentable type of disjointed majesty, this throne-room, the apotheosis of the ruined summer-house outside, a wreck of what had once been a gorgeous but not entirely tasteless mass of plaster gilding and paint in the style of the late Renaissance. Sham large windows had been let in to hide the little grills in the wall; in the intervening space the two hooks were still visible where once lamps had swung to flood the hall from without with artificial daylight. The ceiling, a false one, for the room went up of old to the height of the wall, like the corridor outside it, was painted with a device in cunning perspective, representing the apotheosis (among very pink angels) of King Basilandron, the same who christened the river Ianthe and was responsible for the disaster of the Bacchic revels. The picture, and indeed the entire room, dated from his lifetime. The wall decorations, however (according to information which Norman subsequently gathered), were added by his son--very tasteful designs of apes and Chinamen--_singeries_ and _chinoiseries_. Basilandron II evidently disagreed with his father's idealistic tendencies, and held a firm belief that art should not aim at expressing any meaning, not even a lascivious one, but should rather consist of graceful and intricate designs. In this way he anticipated many of the most brilliant modern theorists. Although these panels had suffered considerably owing to the inferior quality of the paint employed, their condition was good