We saw them no more.
A new strain of music, loud and jubilant, rose from the hidden shrine.
The crowd around me shuddered, and pressed together.
The curtain between the trees was drawn aside, and the shrine was
disclosed to view.
There, raised high on a throne--seated on his typical antelope, with
his four arms stretching towards the four corners of the earth--there,
soared above us, dark and awful in the mystic light of heaven, the god
of the Moon. And there, in the forehead of the deity, gleamed the yellow
Diamond, whose splendour had last shone on me in England, from the bosom
of a woman's dress!
Yes! after the lapse of eight centuries, the Moonstone looks forth once
more, over the walls of the sacred city in which its story first began.
How it has found its way back to its wild native land--by what accident,
or by what crime, the Indians regained possession of their sacred gem,
may be in your knowledge, but is not in mine. You have lost sight of it
in England, and (if I know anything of this people) you have lost sight
of it for ever.
So the years pass, and repeat each other; so the same events revolve in
the cycles of time.
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