Wallace sat down heavily on the floor, held his lamp out over one of the pits and stared with blank incomprehension.
As for the major, he dropped to his knees, threw down his weapons and plunged his arms up to the elbows in the sliding sparkle of the gems.
To have heard him babble, one would have given him free entrance into any lunatic asylum.
The only two who had remained appreciably calm were "Captain Alden" and the Master.

But even they, as fully as all the rest, forgot the impending menace of attack.

For a moment, even their ears were deaf to the muffled tumult outside the door, their senses dulled to every other thing in this world save the incredible hoard there in the golden pits before them.
Pain, exhaustion, defeat ceased to be, for the Legionaries.

Ruin and the shadow of Azrael's wing departed from their minds.

For, bring what the future might, the present was offering them a spectacle such as never before in this world's history had the eyes of white men rested on.
Not even a man _in extremis_ could have turned away his gaze from the unbelievable masses of shimmering wealth in those square pits of gold.
Fairy tales and legends, "Arabian Nights," and all the mystic lore of the East never conjured forth more brain-numbing plenitudes of fortune, nor painted more stupefying beauty, than now gleamed up from those eight excavations hewn in the dull, soft metal.
"_Nom de Dieu!_" Leclair kept monotonously repeating.