They were very insufficiently lighted, like his own room, by means of
barred openings set high in the wall. Indeed gloom and mystery were
the keynotes of this place, amongst the shadows of which handsome,
half-naked servants or priestesses flitted to and fro at their tasks,
or peered at them out of dark corners. The atmosphere seemed heavy
with secret sin; Alan felt that in those rooms unnameable crimes and
cruelties had been committed for hundreds or perhaps thousands of years,
and that the place was yet haunted by the ghosts of them. At any rate it
struck a chill to his healthy blood, more even than had that Hall of the
Dead and of heaped-up golden treasure.
"Does my house please you?" the Asika asked of him.
"Not altogether," he answered, "I think it is dark."
"From the beginning my spirit has ever loved the dark, Vernoon. I think
that it was shaped in some black midnight."
They passed through the chief entrance of the house which had pillars of
woodwork grotesquely carved, down some steps into a walled and roofed-in
yard where the shadows were even more dense than in the house they had
left. Only at one spot was there light flowing down through a hole in
the roof, as it did apparently in that hall where Alan had found the
Asika sitting in state.
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