Free Golden Blood by Jack Williamson Page A

reared their enduring mausoleums upon the Nile.
    One moment he saw Anz living. Then its sand-conquered, time-shattered wreck smote him with a melancholy sense of death and dissolution.
    Aysa sighed hopelessly.
    “Then the prophecy is a jest,” she whispered. “Anz is truly dead. Iru could not be waiting here! ’Tis a city of the sands!”
    “But we may find water.” Price tried to seem hopeful. “There must be wells, or reservoirs.”
    They made the camels slide down the dune, into the old city, and began the weary and seemingly futile search of its forest of ruins.
    It was near noon when they approached a huge pile of shattered marble, standing upon a vast platform of titanic basalt blocks, not yet completely covered by the sifting sand. The flagging camels refused to climb the yielding sand-slopes to the platform, and they left them, to explore the building in search of a well.
    Price afterward cursed himself for not taking his rifle and the holster containing his automatic, which were slung to the pommels of his saddle. But he was almost too weary to stand. And Anz appeared so completely a city of the dead he had no thought of living enemies.
    They clambered to the crumbling platform, and stood beneath a broken colonnade. Aysa studied a half-obliterated inscription on the architrave, turned to Price with weary eagerness, whispering:
    “This is the palace of Iru! The king of the legend, who sleeps.”
    They passed the columns, entered the arched gateway to the palace courtyard.
    “Al Hamdu Lillah!” breathed Price, incredulous.
    In the court, surrounded by high walls that the sand had not overwhelmed, their senses were struck by the cool green fragrance of a sunken garden. Within the inclosure was a tiny, bright oasis, a wondrous tropic garden in the heart of grimmest desolation, richly and blessedly green.
    With sweetest music, crystal water trickled from a stone-rimmed fountain at the end of the court, to spread among a thick jungle of date-palms and fig-trees, of pomegranates and vines and fragrant-flowering shrubs.
    The garden was wild, untended. For a thousand years, by Aysa’s story, no human being had seen it; these plants must have propagated themselves for generations.
    For a moment Price was unbelieving. This wonder of greenery, this song of falling water, was impossible! Stuff of desert-fevered dreams.
    Then with a hoarse, gasping cry, he took Aysa by the arm, and they ran down the crumbling granite steps, unused for a thousand years, to the floor of the hidden garden. Together, they fell on their knees at the fountain’s lip, rinsed bitter dust from their mouths, drank deep of sweet cool water.
    To Price the next hour was a glad dream; a mad riot of delicious sensation, of drinking clear water, of laving the stinging desert grime from his drawn body, of filling himself with fresh, delightful fruits, of resting beside joyous, laughing Aysa in soothing green shade.
    Then he remembered the camels, and they went out together to bring the exhausted beasts into this desert paradise. An involuntary cry of dismay broke from Price’s lips as he came to the edge of the basalt platform, and looked down upon the kneeling hejins.
    The animals were where they had been left. But the saddlebags had been torn open, contents ransacked, part of it scattered about over the sand. The rifle and the automatic, which Price had left slung to his saddle, were gone.

10. IN THE CRYPTS OF ANZ
     
    THE pillaging of the saddle-bags remained a mystery. Peering about the dead city, after he made the discovery, Price was able to see no living being. Utter silence clung to him, tense, expectant… but nothing happened.
    Pushing away their sense of lurking danger, Price and Aysa presently returned their attention to the camels. With some difficulty. Aysa tugging at the halter-ropes, Price pushing and goading from the rear, they got the animals one by one upon the platform, and turned them into the sunken garden.
    Then Price took