The Jewel-Room of Opar
For some time Tarzan lay where he had fallen upon the floor of the treasure chamber beneath the ruined walls of Opar.He lay as one dead; but he was not dead.
At length he stirred.His eyes opened upon the utter darkness of the room.He raised his hand to his head and brought it away sticky with clotted blood.He sniffed at his fingers, as a wild beast might sniff at the life-blood upon a wounded paw.
Slowly he rose to a sitting posture--listening.
No sound reached to the buried depths of his sepulcher.
He staggered to his feet, and groped his way about among the tiers of ingots.What was he? Where was he?
His head ached; but otherwise he felt no ill effects from the blow that had felled him.The accident he did not recall, nor did he recall aught of what had led up to it.
He let his hands grope unfamiliarly over his limbs, his torso, and his head.He felt of the quiver at his back, the knife in his loin cloth.Something struggled for recognition within his brain.Ah! he had it.
There was something missing.He crawled about upon the floor, feeling with his hands for the thing that instinct warned him was gone.At last he found it--the heavy war spear that in past years had formed so important a feature of his daily life, almost of his very existence, so inseparably had it been connected with his every action since the long-gone day that he had wrested his first spear from the body of a black victim of his savage training.
Tarzan was sure that there was another and more lovely world than that which was confined to the darkness of the four stone walls surrounding him.He continued his search and at last found the doorway leading inward beneath the city and the temple.This he followed, most incautiously.He came to the stone steps leading upward to the higher level.He ascended them and continued onward toward the well.
Nothing spurred his hurt memory to a recollection of past familiarity with his surroundings.He blundered on through the darkness as though he were traversing an open plain under the brilliance of a noonday sun, and suddenly there happened that which had to happen under the circumstances of his rash advance.
He reached the brink of the well, stepped outward into space, lunged forward, and shot downward into the inky depths below.Still clutching his spear, he struck the water, and sank beneath its surface, plumbing the depths.
The fall had not injured him, and when he rose to the surface, he shook the water from his eyes, and found that he could see.Daylight was filtering into the well from the orifice far above his head.It illumined the inner walls faintly.Tarzan gazed about him.
On the level with the surface of the water he saw a large opening in the dark and slimy wall.He swam to it, and drew himself out upon the wet floor of a tunnel.
Along this he passed; but now he went warily, for Tarzan of the Apes was learning.The unexpected pit had taught him care in the traversing of dark passageways--he needed no second lesson.
For a long distance the passage went straight as an arrow.The floor was slippery, as though at times the rising waters of the well overflowed and flooded it.
This, in itself, retarded Tarzan's pace, for it was with difficulty that he kept his footing.
The foot of a stairway ended the passage.Up this he made his way.It turned back and forth many times, leading, at last, into a small, circular chamber, the gloom of which was relieved by a faint light which found ingress through a tubular shaft several feet in diameter which rose from the center of the room's ceiling, upward to a distance of a hundred feet or more, where it terminated in a stone grating through which Tarzan could see a blue and sun-lit sky.
Curiosity prompted the ape-man to investigate his surroundings.Several metal-bound, copper-studded chests constituted the sole furniture of the round room.Tarzan let his hands run over these.He felt of the copper studs, he pulled upon the hinges, and at last, by chance, he raised the cover of one.
An exclamation of delight broke from his lips at sight of the pretty contents.Gleaming and glistening in the subdued light of the chamber, lay a great tray full of brilliant stones.Tarzan, reverted to the primitive by his accident, had no conception of the fabulous value of his find.To him they were but pretty pebbles.