CHAPTER XII QUEEN AND CROWN 250 CHAPTER XIII HOW DJAMA PAID HIS DEBT 262 CHAPTER XIV THE RE-KINDLING OF THE SACRED FIRE 271 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS BY ALFRED PEARSE PAGE 'HAIL, SON OF THE SUN!' _Frontispiece_ 'AM I ONLY DREAMING THAT THE DEATH-SLEEP IS OVER?' 26 THE DAGGER-POINT DROPPED TILL IT WAS WITHIN AN INCH OF GOLDEN STAR'S BREAST 119 THEY THRUST HIM IN WITH HIS ARMS STILL BOUND 205 IT HAD SMITTEN HIM TO THE HEART 228 NOW THE MOMENT FOR THE GIVING OF THE SIGN HAD COME 280 The Romance of Golden Star PROLOGUE I HIS HIGHNESS THE MUMMY 'Ah, what a thing it would be for us if his Inca Highness were really only asleep, as he looks to be! Just think what he could tell us--how easily he could re-create that lost wonderland of his for us, what riddles he could answer, what lies he could contradict. And then think of all the lost treasures that he could show us the way to. Upon my word, if Mephistopheles were to walk into this room just now, I think I should be tempted to make a bargain with him. Do you know, Djama, I believe I would give half the remainder of my own life, whatever that may be, to learn the secrets that were once locked up in that withered, desiccated brain of his.' The speaker was one of two men who were standing in a large room, half-study, half-museum, in a big, old-fashioned house in Maida Vale. Wherever the science of archaeology was studied, Professor Martin Lamson was known as the highest living authority on the subject of the antiquities of South America. He had just returned from a year's relic-hunting in Peru and Bolivia, and was enjoying the luxury of unpacking his treasures with the almost boyish delight which, under such circumstances, comes only to the true enthusiast. His companion was a somewhat slenderly-built man, of medium height, whose clear, olive skin, straight, black hair, and deep blue-black eyes betrayed a not very remote Eastern origin. Dr Laurens Djama was a physiologist, whose rapidly-acquired fame--he was barely thirty-two--would have been considered sounder by his professional brethren if it had not been, as they thought, impaired by excursions into by-ways of science which were believed to lead him perilously near to the borders of occultism. Five years before he had pulled the professor through a very bad attack of the calentura in Panama, where they met by the merest traveller's chance, and since then they had been fast friends.