"Stop!" Croft cut short his incipient protest. "Would question my demands?" "But the Gayana--" Zud began a faltering explanation. His companion took a single step toward him. His jaw thrust out in an almost menacing manner, indicative of a will to brook no opposition: "May be entered by him who wears the wings of the Angel of Life as well as the high priest." For a long, breathless instant the glances of the two men met and crossed, engaging the one with the other. And then Zud was beaten down. He yielded. "Permit that I show you," he said, and led the way. CHAPTER V BEHIND THE SILVER DOOR They passed from the room and along a corridor in which the oil sconces had now been extinguished, faintly illuminated by the light of the new day. Before a massive door Zud paused and set his hand to a slender cord. His action was followed by the muffled clanging of a brazen gong. He slid the door open and revealed the shadow-wrapped throat of a shaft, up which a platform presently trembled into view. It was a primitive form of elevator operated, as Croft knew, by a Mazzerian crew in the foundations of the pyramid itself, lifting and lowering it on signal, by winding its cable on and off a revolving drum. With Zud, he stepped aboard. The platform mounted slowly up the shaft. The high priest, with a hand on an inner cord, observed its progress, and presently once more the gong far below clanged out. The platform stopped. They stepped into a very short corridor between masonry walls of a cut and polished stone not unlike marble, save that it held a strange, translucent quality in its substance and was wholly white. The main staircase of the pyramid mounted before them and ran on toward the top, with its crowning Temple of Zitu, and just beyond it, at the far end of the corridor, was a door. Silver it was, the most precious of Palosian metals, tooled and carved into the design of a full-sized woman's figure, in whose hand was the looped cross of immortal life. Croft thrilled as they paused before it. This was the entrance to the quarters of the Gayana. Here it was that Naia had waited for him when he plunged into the venture of the Zollarian war. Then briefly he had held her in his arms, and she had told him that none should claim her ever save himself, or, failing that, she would remain forever virgin in the sanctuary of Ga beyond this door outside which now he stood so very, very differently from what he had once thought that he should. And suddenly the knowledge of what Zud had told her--of the shock of revelation that must have come upon her, the torment to her every finer sensibility and feeling--caused an actual sensation of constriction in Croft's chest. He stood with tight-set lips and flaring nostrils as Zud put up a hand and pressed against the left breast of the woman on the door.