Twilight of a God

THE contractors’ temporary fencing sagged as Matthew Fowlsey leaned his weight on it and watched the clearance of a building site on the main street of his village. Fifteen feet below him, at the bottom of a slope of rubble and broken brick, the scoop was working close to the bedrock. His eyes, keen and humorous as those of a robin waiting by the spade for worms, were shielded from the sun by enormous pepper-and-salt eyebrows. Only a man whose work and hobby were connected with the ground under his feet could have permitted such luxuriant growth without ever finding it inconvenient.

He suddenly tobogganed into the hole alongside the scoop, which clanged shut a foot from his right ear.

“Closish shave, that, guv’nor!” said the dry, weary voice of the foreman from the lip of the excavation.

“Miles to spare,” Fowlsey answered, cleaning the earth from a tile which he had rescued.

“Didn’t stop to think, did yer, what would happen to me if your ‘ead was in the truck?”

“He knows his job,” Fowlsey said, pointing to the crane cabin. “He could take your hat off with that scoop without spoiling your parting. So could I.”

“In the contracting business yourself?”

“No. Oil. Before I retired.”

“Don’t wonder they wear tin ‘ats on the job. Wotcha got there?”

“A Roman tile. I thought I saw two D’s scratched on it. And I did.”

“Writing, like?”

“With the point of a sword, perhaps. I don’t think he could have cut so deep with a stylus.”

“Ain’t come across a two-inch grease nipple with a screw thread, ‘ave you?”

Fowlsey retired under his eyebrows and searched the ground beneath the crane.

“Here it is,” he said.

“Cor! I was lookin’ for that bastard half an hour last night.”

Matthew Fowlsey returned home with his tile and was greeted by his wife with a cheerful cry that lunch was ready. Assuring her that he would not be a moment, he retired to his study. The slow revelations of his soapy water, solvents, and acids were more interesting than the shouted appeals which he automatically answered. Lunch could wait.

Three quarters of an hour later he appeared in the dining room carrying the tile.

“Muriel! Vagliodunum! It is Prior’s Norton, my dear. I picked this up from a hole in the main street. The graffito of a legionary! Roughly translated, it means ‘God rot Vagliodunum.’ ”

“If Vagliodunum is Prior’s Norton, Matthew, I entirely agree with him,” Muriel said, and left the room.

There was a cold mess on the table which had been a souffle, and a stew on the sideboard which he recognized — though it was now glazed with cold grease — as a very creditable shot at his favorite Persian dish. Darling Muriel. Damn — and she wouldn’t cool down till evening.

Ever since Fowlsey discovered a gold coin of Alexander the Great in the stomach of a Caucasian wild goat he had realized that archaeology was the ideal hobby for a mining engineer, though at the time his interest had been in the goat’s diet. He polished his classics and mastered the scripts, ancient and modern, of the Middle East till his opinions aroused as much curiosity among dons as prospectors. Always more fascinated by discovery than finance, he had retired with a knighthood but only a comfortable pension. He was thoroughly happy. Living in Prior’s Norton was a new experience—perhaps, he admitted, a little too new for Muriel.

Sir Matthew washed up the dishes, picked roses from the garden, and deployed upon his wife that charm which, in pursuit of his hobby, had always overwhelmed authority, from ministers of culture to headmen of villages. Having won her smiling permission to invite Charles Kinsale over from Oxford for a couple of nights, he picked up the telephone and dictated a long wire.

Kinsale’s reply was uncompromising but satisfactory: DON’T BELIEVE A WORD OF IT BUT SHALL COME FOR MURIEL AND SAUSAGES.

“Charles believes in nothing,” Sir Matthew complained, “but the later Roman Empire and his own belly.”

“That makes him very easy to entertain, my dear,”

The Prior’s Norton sausages were unique. They lent themselves to grilling rather than frying and were temperamental at that, but Muriel, aided by the advice of Miss Mallaby, who kept a tea shop on the main street, had brought the art of cooking them to perfection. Friends from more spacious days angled for invitations to a meal as if the Fowlseys were still cosseted by a host of native cooks and houseboys.

Charles Kinsale arrived early the following afternoon. After complimenting Muriel with lengthy eighteenth-century politeness, he was dragged off impatiently to the study. He was a much younger man than his host, but lacked the air of youth which irradiated Sir Matthew. When he made a definite statement it was so.

“I have looked up everything known about Vagliodunum, Matthew,” he said modestly. “The site is unidentified. According to the Antonine Itinerary it should be about eight and a half miles south of here.”

“That site has been excavated.”

“Really? By whom?" Kinsale’s voice rose to an academic falsetto of disbelief.

“It’s in the middle of a brickfield,” said Fowlsey.

“Very well, Matthew. Quite. But that does not help us. Now, I agree that the scribbler on your tile was Italian. So there is a possibility—we can put it no higher — that he was a soldier. All he tells us is that he disliked Vagliodunum. He does not tell us that Vagliodunum is Prior’s Norton.”

“Yes, he does. Soldiers curse the place they happen to be stationed, not the place where they were stationed before.”

“Is that fact or conjecture?”

“Fact,” replied Sir Matthew boldly, aware that there might be exceptions to his rule but that this was not the occasion to elaborate them.

“I will make a note of it. Now, I have another scrap of information for you. There is a fragment of a fourth-century geographer dealing with Roman Britain. It is believed by Hascnsohren, who is sometimes inspired, to come from an Alexandrian commentary on the earlier geography of Marinas.”

“The Marinus who was also used by Ptolemy?” Sir Matthew asked, scoring a point.

“Quite. The text of the fragment is corrupt. Vagliodunum is a possible but not a very likely reading. But whatever town he is talking about had a considerable Temple of Mithras — for goodness’ sake, don’t jump to conclusions, Matthew — two hundred paces to the right of the cross as you come from the southeast.”

“That would put it under the church!” Fowlsev exclaimed. “The market cross is the Roman crossroads. Come on. Let’s go.”

PRIOR’S NORTON lay in a shallow, green valley between limestone hills. Its main street, running over well-drained gravel above the stream, had been constantly used by man from paleolithic hunters to the excavators of the hole where Sir Matthew had found his tile. The lane which crossed it at right angles, charging straight down one slope, over a paved ford, and straight up the other, was Roman and nothing much else.

Kinsale, protesting, was led over the ford by a white, wooden footbridge and up to the main street. To their right were the manor, the church, and the vicarage; to their left, the village shops.

Sir Matthew introduced his distinguished friend to the vicar, who politely pretended to have heard of him.

“Kinsale has some fascinating evidence that there is a Mithraeum under the church.”

“I am here,” Charles insisted sternly, “merely in hope of wealth. Sir Matthew’s luck is fantastic. When it was his business to look for oil he found antiquities. Now that he can devote himself to archaeology, he will certainly strike oil. But there is no more chance of a Mithraeum under your church, Vicar, than under my college.”

“A Mithraeum?” said the vicar. “Well, I suppose it might be here if anywhere. So many churches are on the sites of older temples. Mithras — now, let me see . . .”

“Of Persian origin,” Kinsale expounded. “The giver of life, intermediary between God and man. lake other mystical religions. Mithraism was very popular in the army and with old ladies. Baptism was by bull’s blood. Some form of Mithraism might well be our religion today but for the accident that Christianity was better suited to the political system of Constantine.”

“And no doubt to other purposes as well,” said the vicar. “I remember now. It was a religion of great beauty. Perhaps it helped to prepare the way. Well, if there was ever a Mithraeum we ought to find some trace of it. The church is built on bedrock, and we can get at the foundations.”

They could — just. But the space was less than five feet, too low to walk and too high to crawl. Fowlsey was enjoying himself on hands and knees; so, apparently, was the vicar. After half an hour of examining rock under the light of their torches, Charles Kinsale, weary of repeating that all the chisel marks were medieval, considered that the vicar might have warned him what he was in for. It had possibly been tactless to mention Constantine, let alone the old ladies.

“So what do you think?” asked Fowlsey when they returned to daylight, covered with cobwebs.

“That you should join the Boy Scouts, Matthew. No doubt they have a badge for proficiency in archaeology. Have you perhaps a clothesbrush. Vicar, before we venture upon the main street of Sir Matthew’s Vagliodunum?”

“You know, I’ll tell you what happened,” Fowlsey said. “Your geographer got turned inside out. Vagliodunum was a garrison town.”

“What the hell has that got to do with it?”

“He might have been dining in mess. Come on, they say, you’re off in the morning, but there’s time to visit our Mithraeum and kill another bottle with the flute girl afterwards. Now, there’s a round hill on each side of the valley, and both look reasonably alike. He wouldn’t know which was which after dinner. When he said two hundred paces right of the cross, he meant left.”

“You are too inclined, Matthew, to judge our ancestors by yourself.”

“And a very good thing, too.”

“That would put it under dear Miss Mallaby’s tea shop,” said the vicar.

“Or under the Dog and Lobster. We’ll pace it out.”

“Matthew, I have already told you . . .”

“I know. But all I want you to do, Charles, is to pace out two hundred yards and have a look at the cellars of the Dog and Lobster.”

“The pubs aren’t open yet,” said Kinsale weakly.

“For the scholar all doors are open, Charles. Even among Kurds and Yezidis. And Mr. Bunn is a Christian innkeeper who at the moment will be staking his sweet peas.”

PRIOR’S NORTON was full of Friday afternoon shoppers. Sir Matthew marched along the curb, counting aloud up to two hundred and raising his hat to the bicyclists and pram pushers whom he incommoded. He arrived precisely in front of Miss Mallaby’s tea shop. Her neat window, decorated by homemade jams, pickles, cakes, and scones, preserved a ladylike propriety between the coarser attractions of the Dog and Lobster on one side and James Ing, Butcher and Licensed Game Dealer, on the other.

Mr. Bunn was not exactly staking his sweet peas, but he was in the garden thinking about it. After ten minutes’ talk on the weather and control of slugs, Sir Matthew asked if they might inspect the cellars.

“Nothing down there but empties,” replied Mr. Bunn, looking suspiciously at Kinsale. “What’s he an inspector of?”

“Nothing. Am I the sort of man, Mr. Bunn, to set inspectors on my neighbors?”

“Well, sir, you ‘aven’t been ‘ere long enough for us to make you out, like. Not that I’ve anything against inspectors,” he added hastily, remembering that there were at least two among his customers. “A quieter, more well-be’aved lot of gentlemen I don’t want to see.”

“Mr. Kinsale is the greatest living authority on the later Roman Empire . . .”

“Matthew, I — ”

“Shut up! If I knew a better one, I’d send for him. His University of Oxford” — Mr. Bunn’s brewers were in Oxford, and he made a sort of grunt of profound respect — “is interested in the history of our village. What Mr. Kinsale wants to see is if there is any trace of Roman masonry in your cellar.”

The cellars ran under the whole length of the Dog and Lobster. In front they appeared to have been dug out of the gravel and lined with stone. At the back they had been cut from the hillside.

“Well?” asked Sir Matthew eagerly,

“My dear fellow, when the ceiling of a rock cave has been whitewashed over and over for several hundred years, it’s impossible to say offhand who cut it. What’s through the brick wall at the end?”

“That’s Ing, that is, beyond the wall,” Mr. Bunn replied. “It all belonged to the Dog and Lobster once, when the Mallabys kept it. Four hundred years, father to son, they were ‘ere. And that’s only what they knows of.”

“Miss Mallaby hasn’t any cellars then?”

“What would she want with a cellar? Why, Ing and me, we don’t use what we’ve got. No, she’s just got the shop which ‘er grandfather made for ‘er when she wouldn’t take over the pub. And that reminds me. There’s a few bottles in the vault there from ‘er grandfather’s day. Would you gentlemen like to tell me what’s in ‘em? I’m told they drinks a lot of old wine in them colleges at Oxford.”

“In moderation,” said Kinsale. “In moderation. Don’t wave it about, Mr. Bunn. Here, let me.”

Borrowing Mr. Bunn’s corkscrew, he opened the first bottle with reverent care. It was dead and undrinkable. So were the next two. But the fourth was a brown sherry in the flower of great age.

“Prefer a drop of Scotch myself,” said Mr. Bunn, tasting it with disapproval. “But if you gentlemen are that ‘appy with it, why, you can’t do better than finish it up.”

He refilled the tumblers.

“Any more bottles of it?” asked Kinsale.

“No. Nothing ‘ere but what you can see.”

Mr. Bunn whacked the back of the vault with a brewer’s mallet. “Solid,” he said regretfully. “Solid rock.”

Half an hour later Fowlsey and Kinsale emerged into the daylight, thanking Mr. Bunn profusely and a little noisily.

“Now we will call on Miss Mallaby,” said Sir Matthew, pacing the length of her shop window and balancing himself with too obvious concentration as he placed one foot in front of the other along the narrow curb. “That niche was Roman, damn it!”

“Might just conceivably be, Matthew,” shouted Kinsale. “Not, I beg you, is!”

Miss Mallaby withdrew a plate of cakes from the window. She was tall and dark with a faint and graying mustache. She had a maiden lady’s penetrating stare in which alarm and authority were equally mixed.

“And I am not calling on her with this breath, Matthew.”

“Perhaps you are right. To Ing then!”

“He is the man who makes the sausages?”

“He is.”

“Then at least I have the excuse of telling him what I think of them.”

Mr. James Ing was evidently accustomed to enthusiastic compliments. He received them with a nervous dignity. For a butcher he seemed a reserved little man. He had the blue-striped apron, round face, and ruddy complexion of his trade, but all in miniature. He consented to accept a monthly order for sausages to be sent by post. The distinguished address of Kinsale’s college appeared to take a weight off his mind. “Always like to know whom I’m dealing with,” he said. “Can’t be too careful with strangers.”

He was quite willing to show what was under his shop, and led them down a semicircular staircase with a dark recess beneath it. The cellars were obviously a continuation of those of the Dog and Lobster.

Sir Matthew paced out the length. “I make it an eighteen-inch wall between Mr. Bunn and Mr. Ing,” he announced. “So Grandpa Mallaby sold the lot.”

“Why shouldn’t he?” asked the butcher with a blank stare.

“No reason at all. What’s through there?”

“Cold store,” replied Mr. Ing, throwing open a door which closed one of the vaults in the inner wall.

“Containing,” Kinsale added impatiently, “no departed Caesars, but two pigs, a bullock, and a lamb.”

“Four sausages on the floor, two and a half pigs, a bullock, and a sheep,” Sir Matthew corrected him.

“To a butcher all sheep are lambs.”

“No, they ain’t, sir, begging your pardon,” said Mr. Ing, “not when a customer asks for mutton.”

AFTER a walk along the lane which once had been a Roman highway, Sir Matthew and Charles Kinsale regained a Roman dignity. When they returned home in the cool of the evening, the house smelled delectably of the famous sausages. They carried a Martini for Muriel into the kitchen. She did not seem to be responding correctly to their compliments and attention.

“My dears,” she said, “Miss Mallaby has been here.”

“Oh, ginger cake, good!” Sir Matthew exclaimed.

“I am afraid you have upset her rather badly. You have been staring at her shop and bothering Ing and Bunn.”

“What’s the matter with the woman? There’s nothing odd in archaeology. Even Kurds and Yezidis . . .”

“But not an English village, dear. And you never know how loud your voice is.”

“I didn’t say anything. I never went near Miss Mallaby. Charles looked at her through, the window.”

“You were measuring it, Matthew,” said Charles promptly.

“Well, what about it?”

“Don’t boom at me, dear. Are you sure you were both quite . . .”

“Muriel!” exclaimed Charles Kinsale, much shocked. “The pubs were not open, and the vicar didn’t offer us anything.”

“Yes, of course. Perhaps I misunderstood Miss Mallaby. She was so very agitated. But if you have to excavate the only shops in the village who ever have anything fit to eat, Matthew, do let me handle it for you.”

“Excavation,” said Kinsale, using the full prestige of learning to divert the conversation to a higher level. “I always feel it is a tragedy. A hundred years hence they will do it so much better.”

He continued to lecture, changing the subject, when the bronze mound of sausages was on the table, from archaeology to analysis of flavor.

“Sage and pork, of course,” he murmured after his fifth, “and there is a suggestion that somewhere along the line of ancestry was a black pudding. But am I a medieval schoolman that I should discourse upon the ingredients of heaven? For the moment they are supplied by Muriel and James Ing, whose efforts you, my dear Matthew, like an amiable and attendant angel, have underlined by this admirable claret.”

When Muriel had left them alone, Sir Matthew refilled the glasses. “Very nicely to the rescue, Charles. Damn Miss Mallaby! But have you seriously been thinking of excavation?”

“Not for a moment. You have made your usual find with your usual luck. But excavation wouldn’t produce any more sherry.”

“Sherry? The sherry, my good man, is a clue, not a discovery. Mr. Bunn was distracting our attention from his cellar to its contents. That was obvious to me when Muriel mentioned Miss Mallaby’s visit. Why should she be driven to hysterics by my balancing feats upon the curbstone?”

“I suggest she was subconsciously devastated by your physical attractions.”

“Nonsense! Miss Mallaby is grim but sane. No, they are all hiding something, and it’s behind the back wall which Bunn was so anxious to prove solid. In a remote spot like this the worship of Mithras might still be carried on.”

“With James Ing sacrificing the bull?”

“Pipe down! That’s all forgotten. I mean a mild little center of vague superstition with Miss Mallaby as presiding witch — except that she’s a pillar of the church and runs the Women’s Institute.”

“They generally do, Matthew. But covines are very rare. An illicit distillery would be more likely.”

“Then you agree they are hiding something?”

“The evidence is more convincing than for Vagliodunum.”

“Five minutes in Ing’s cellar without Ing is all we need. Look here. I will order a leg of mutton. When Ing goes down to the cold store to fetch it, you tiptoe after him.”

“Damn it, Matthew, I draw the line at burglary.”

“It’s only trespassing. While he is inside the cold store you hide under the stairs. Ing comes up with the carcass. When he has served me, he takes it back again. I follow and join you under the stairs.”

“How and when do we get out?”

“Easy as pie. Whenever Ing comes down for meat and is safely inside the cold store again. Then we tiptoe up the stairs and walk boldly past the customers, if any, with our parcels.”

NEXT morning after breakfast Kinsale flatly refused to play his part, but Sir Matthew, aware from long experience that men of books invariably feel inferior to men of action, shamed him into it and explained to Muriel that they intended to spend an hour or two at the excavation in the main street. The butcher’s was empty. Prior’s Norton did not do its shopping before eleven.

All went well. Kinsale, started by a merciless push, vanished downstairs behind James Ing and did not reappear. After cutting and wrapping the leg of mutton, Ing returned to the cold store with the carcass. Sir Matthew prepared to follow him but was interrupted by the vicar, who wanted sausages, and two housewives in need only of conversation. It was no good hanging around the shop. He went over the road to talk to the foreman at the excavation.

At last Mr. Ing got rid of his customers and took the opportunity to deliver a loin of pork to the Dog and Lobster. Sir Matthew strolled back across the road, entered the butcher’s, looked out through the window to ensure that he was not observed, and an instant later was in the cellar.

“You’ve been the devil of a time!” whispered Kinsale.

“Couldn’t help it. Found anything?”

“Yes. There’s a sliding door at the back of the cold store.”

“Where does it go?”

“Really. Matthew, I do not know,” replied Kinsale testily. “We are responsible persons, not little boys on a treasure hunt. And anyway, the door was locked.”

“Oh, my God!” Matthew Fowlsey suddenly exclaimed, creeping up to the curve of the stair and listening.

“But I saw him go in, Mr. Ing,” insisted Muriel’s voice, “when I was down the road, and I am sure he has not come out.”

“Indeed, madam?” James Ing answered politely.

The probable explanation appeared to dawn on him. He repeated with indignation, “Indeed, madam!”

Determined steps sounded overhead. Sir Matthew dragged Kinsale into the cold store and shut the door. “You don’t know what it is,” he whispered frantically. “You’re not married. I’ve been told not to monkey, and I’ve monkeyed. I tell you, this could mean she’d go on strike and make me live in a flat in London!”

The sliding door at the back was partly hidden by the two halves of the bullock. It was not noticeable at a glance, but not particularly secret. Mr. Ing could well have bought a double-doored refrigerating unit cheap.

“I don’t believe it goes anywhere,” Sir Matthew hissed. “He got it off a bankrupt butcher and installed it as it was. Hell! It doesn’t open. Hell!”

The handle on their side had been removed. He thrust the small blade of his pocketknife into the socket and turned. The blade snapped, but a second operation with the stump did the trick. The steps of Muriel and James Ing were already audible in the cellar. He pushed Kinsale through the door and slid it shut again, breathing heavily.

Sir Matthew switched on his torch. They were in a long, narrow cellar under the hillside. To their left was a stone stair evidently leading into the back of Miss Mallaby’s shop. The flags of the floor were spotlessly clean.

At one end of the cellar were various tubs and buckets, at the other was an immense butcher’s slab of solid oak, scored and hollowed by long use. Knives and choppers were neatly laid out on the scrubbed surface. The delectable, spicy smell was enough to tell them that this was where Ing’s sausages were made.

They stared at each other, completely puzzled. There was the click of a switch above the staircase. The cellar was lit up. Miss Mallaby, a formidable figure in black, stood upon the third step looking down on them.

“Sir Matthew,” she pronounced with dignity, “I am quite prepared to be reported to the police. But I must request you to leave my premises immediately.”

She stood a little to one side, pointing to the way past her. Fowlsey and Kinsale were hypnotized into a slow march before the power of speech returned.

“B-b-but why should I report you to the police, Miss Mallaby?” Sir Matthew asked.

“ I presume that now that you are in possession of the evidence you will consider it your duty.”

“I still don’t see . . .”

“Inspectors! I do!” Kinsale exclaimed. “Making sausages of unknown ingredients upon unlicensed premises. Hygiene! Modernity! Stainless steel! If the beaks knew Miss Mallaby was making sausages down here, they’d slap a fiftypound fine on her. Good Lord, we ought to be hung. May I assure you, madam, that you are a public benefactor and that nothing would induce either of us ever to open our mouths.”

“Then what are you gentlemen doing here?”

“Miss Mallaby, that arch over your head is very probably Roman. Your cellar was—I mean, may have been — cut out of the hillside some seventeen hundred years ago. That accounts for our curiosity, our perhaps discourteous curiosity. I am an authority upon the period. Sir Matthew is — er — a more general authority.”

“When you come to my age, madam,” said Sir Matthew pathetically, “you will realize that it is most difficult to pace distances while preserving balance.”

“Oh, sir!” said Miss Mallaby, joining them on the floor. “But you will understand my agitation. Only Mr. Bunn and Mr. Ing are in on the secret.”

“But why run the risk, dear Miss Mallaby? Why not go into partnership with Ing?”

“My grandfather wished the dispensary to remain in the family,” Miss Mallaby explained stubbornly. “The Mallabys, Sir Matthew, always took a pride in the preparation of comestibles. Everything which they sold or served in the inn was homemade on the premises. You will no doubt be surprised to learn that there is a reference to Mallaby’s faggots in the kitchen account of Queen Elizabeth.”

“Those sausages did seem to me somehow out of Ing’s character,” said Kinsale. “An excellent fellow, but not the type to have a magic touch. How do you make them. Miss Mallaby?”

“Like everything else, it’s a matter of care and exact measurement, Mr. Kinsale.”

“Scholarship. Precisely! You hear that, Matthew? Unsound methods can only lead to the sort of blundering which Miss Mallaby has been good enough to overlook.”

“Yes, Charles. What does the Dog and Lobster remind you of?”

“Are you thinking of Dr. Johnson’s cat which ate oysters?”

“No, I’m not. There’s good reason for the name of every pub in England — usually the arms of some great family. But no arms have as supporters a dog and a lobster. Then some actual occurrence? A lobster, for example, which delighted the peasantry by catching hold of a dog’s tail? But Prior’s Norton is too far from the sea. I suggest that if the villagers, centuries ago, were familiar with the reliefs upon an altar of Mithras, they would have noticed his hound and scorpion.”

“Of all the wild, preposterous . . .” Kinsale began.

“Nonsense! The names of pubs arc historical documents. It’s the soundest piece of evidence I have produced yet. Miss Mallaby’s ancestors had no idea of the origin of the altar. They couldn’t move it. They were tired of the pictures. So they covered it up and put it to use. That faint suggestion of black pudding in the sausages — isn’t one of the ingredients a little bullock’s blood, Miss Mallaby?”

“I don’t see how you guessed it wasn’t pig’s, Sir Matthew. But you are quite right.”

“And that is all which remains of a great religion after sixty generations,” Fowlsey declared. “That and a little of the power of the god, would you say, Charles? It was you who mentioned magic in the sausages.”

“I’d say, to use an Americanism, that you’ve gone nuts.”

“No. You are looking at the altar of Mithras.”

“Where?”

“There!” Sir Matthew shouted, pointing to the butcher’s slab. “There, where the bull died and gave life to the people.”

“Assuming that is the altar, the niches are in the right place,” said Charles.

“Miss Mallaby, may we?” begged Sir Matthew. “Without letting another soul into the secret I can lift the casing off the altar with a block and tackle and do no damage to either.”

“I am afraid you would. The dowel pins have shrunk. I think perhaps the front of the slab would come away if you were to extract them. No, not with that knife, if you please, Sir Matthew. I will fetch you a gimlet.”

“Madam, you must be the only woman in the world to realize that a gimlet can be used like a corkscrew to extract a wooden peg.”

“I have been compelled by circumstance,” said Miss Mallaby primly, “to do all repairs to the cellar myself.”

Sir Matthew removed the dowels without much difficulty. “If you will now lift the top slightly, Charles, the whole front will be free.”

The noble slab of oak fell down. There, cut in the marble of the altar, was the god Mithras slaving the bull. The reliefs, except to eyes familiar with the composition, were not immediately obvious. In the upper half, the knife, the bull’s head, and the face of the god were worn faint. But at the bottom the scorpion and the waiting hound were as clear and vivid as if they had been chiseled the week before.

“There is only one other to be compared with it in all Europe,” said Charles reverently. “Miss Mallaby, Miss Mallaby, what are we to do? Your cellar will become a place of pilgrimage.”

“The sooner the better, Mr. Kinsale. No doubt Mr. Ing and I will be able to come to some mutually profitable arrangement. Whatever my ancestors may have thought, I should not wish to continue making sausages upon a heathen altar, and I am sure the dear vicar would agree.”