But there was no repressing the excitable young Rawson. When he was not drawing pictures of the serpents and wild beasts that probably infested the thickets beside the temples, he would be diverting me with the most grewsome ghost stories I had ever heard; and he went so far as to suggest that the dancing girls had been only airy apparitions, while the brilliant golden lights above us had no more reality than a will-o’-the-wisp. Evidently he had been too much nurtured on fiction of the blood-and-terror variety, for only a devotee of the most hectic adventure tales could have imagined, as he did, that our pathway was beset with robbers’ lairs, pirates’ dens, scorpions and crocodiles, head-hunting cannibals, siren women luring us to destruction, and murderous desperadoes of a thousand ilks and guilds. Fortunately for my peace of mind, I heard not half of Rawson’s ravings, for my interest in the wayside architecture served as a distraction. For two or three hours I was occupied with inspecting the gracefully connecting galleries of five or six temples; and, having passed the last of the group, I was absorbed in my observations of a long, marble colonnade which extended apparently for miles in a straight line amid the gray and brown fantastic vegetation. And now it was that I made the most startling discovery of the day. At intervals along the floor of the colonnade, which was of a red and yellow mosaic of baked and hardened clay, appeared deeply-graven inscriptions which I paused eagerly to survey. At first I thought that they were in no known language, but it was not long before I had detected a certain resemblance between the characters and those of the ancient Greek. Profiting from my collegiate study of that tongue, I puzzled over the words while Rawson stood by impatiently urging me to be off; and one by one I succeeded in identifying the letters with those of the Greek alphabet! Not every one of the characters, it is true, could be recognized with assurance, but enough of them were unmistakably Greek to give me a clue to the whole; and at length I found myself making a translation that might solve the entire mystery of this extraordinary land. * * * * *