Then holding it up he said, "There, that's the
stone your horse had picked up.
The purport was, that, at some future day, a child should be born hereabouts, who was destined to become the greatest and noblest personage of his time, and whose countenance, in manhood, should bear an exact resemblance to the Great
Stone Face.
For which the astronomers (who have written large systems concerning the
stone) assign the following reason: that the magnetic virtue does not extend beyond the distance of four miles, and that the mineral, which acts upon the
stone in the bowels of the earth, and in the sea about six leagues distant from the shore, is not diffused through the whole globe, but terminated with the limits of the king's dominions; and it was easy, from the great advantage of such a superior situation, for a prince to bring under his obedience whatever country lay within the attraction of that magnet.
The man with the feathers went up to the
stone, stooped, slipped his hands under the face lying upon the ground, stiffened his Herculean muscles, and without a strain, with a slow motion, like that of a machine, he lifted the end of the rock a foot from the ground.
The mineral waters of Arva Wai* ooze forth from the crevices of a rock, and gliding down its mossy side, fall at last, in many clustering drops, into a natural basin of
stone fringed round with grass and dewy-looking little violet-coloured flowers, as fresh and beautiful as the perpetual moisture they enjoy can make them.
"See, my lords," she said, holding the light before her, "those who stored the treasure here fled in haste, and bethought them to guard against any who should find the secret of the door, but had not the time," and she pointed to large square blocks of
stone, which, to the height of two courses (about two feet three), had been placed across the passage with a view to walling it up.
It was a desert, weed-grown waste, littered thickly with
stones the size of a man's fist.
This remonstrance being received with yells and flying
stones, according to a custom of late years comfortably established among the police regulations of our English communities, where Christians are stoned on all sides, as if the days of Saint Stephen were revived, Durdles remarks of the young savages, with some point, that 'they haven't got an object,' and leads the way down the lane.
"And as soon as Sir Kay saw the sword he wist well it was the sword of the
stone, and he rode to his father Sir Ector and said:
"What is that?" he calmly asked, looking with attention at the horizontal lines of black and
stone colour.
"It was awful here in the mouth of the cave, for I had not yet learned the secret of the
stone, and if I had known it, should I have dared to close it, leaving myself alone with the dead wolves and him whom the wolves had struggled to tear down?
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.