Only the age-old silence brooded over the mysterious ruins of Kuthchemes, but Fear was there; Fear quivered in the mind of Shevatas, the thief, driving his breath quick and sharp against his clenched teeth.

He stood, the one atom of life admidst the colossal monuments of desolation and decay.  Not even a vulture hung like a black dot in the vast blue vault of the sky that the sun glazed with its heat.  On every hand rose the grim relics of another, forgotten age: huge broken pillars, thrusting up their jagged pinnacles into the sky; long, wavering lines of crumbling walls; fallen cyclopean blocks of stone; shattered images, whose horrific features the corroding winds and dust storms had half erased.  From horizon to horizon no sign of life: only the sheer breathtaking sweep of the naked desert, bisected by the wandering line of a long-dry river course; in the midst of that vastness the glimmering fangs of the ruins, the columns standing up like broken masts of sunken ships - all dominated by the towering ivory dome before which Shevatas stood trembling.

The base of this dome was a gigantic pedestal of marble, rising from what had once been a terraced eminence on the banks of the ancient river.  Broad steps led up to a great bronze door in the dome, which rested on its base like the half of some titanic egg.  The dome itself was of pure ivory, which shone as if unknown hands kept it polished.  Likewise shone the spired gold cap of the pinnacle, and the inscription which sprawled about the curve of the dome in golden hieroglyphics yards long.  No man on earth could read those characters, but Shevatas shuddered . at the dim conjectures they raised.  For he came of a very old race, whose myths ran back to shapes undreamed of by contemporary tribes.

Shevatas was wiry and lithe, as became a master thief of Zamora.  His small, round head was shaven, his only garment a loincloth of scarlet silk.  Like all his race, he was very dark, his narrow vulture-like face set off by his keen black eyes.  His long, slender, and tapering fingers were quick and nervous as the wings of a moth.  From a gold-scaled girdle hung a short, narrow, jewel-hilted sword in a sheath of ornamented leather.  Shevatas handled the weapon with apparently exaggerated care.  He even seemed to flinch away from the contact of the sheath with his naked thigh.  Nor was his care without reason.

This was Shevatas, a thief among thieves, whose name was spoken with awe in the dives of the Maul and the dim shadowy recesses beneath the temples of Bel, and who lived in songs and myths for a thousand years.  Yet fear ate at the heart of Shevatas as he stood before the ivory dome of Kuthchemes.  Ane fool could see there was something unnatural about the structure; the winds and suns suns of three thousand years had lashed it, yet its gold and ivory rose bright and glistening as the day it was reared by nameless hands on the bank of the nameless river.