* * *
That such as she existed among the usually ugly Koreans and Manchurians
was impossible! I gasped a little in unbelief. Her clothing was like
nothing on this earth.
Soft green leather was clasped low on her hips with a narrow gold band,
set with jewels. It was a skirt, I suppose, but it hung with a diagonal
hem-line running from hip to knee, it was beaded in an intricate
pattern, not Oriental, somehow reminding me of American Indian bead
work.
On her feet leather sandals, laced like the ancient Greek sandal nearly
to the knee. In her hand a bow of horn, small and powerful. Around her
shoulders a short leather cape similarly beaded and fringed. Around her
brows a jeweled circlet set like a diadem, and it crowned a young queen,
proud and knowing very well her beauty and its power.
Her features were neither Caucasian nor Oriental, certainly not the
heavy-boned native stock. I couldn't pin them down to any race. Her nose
was straight, the nostrils neither wide nor narrow, but strong and firm.
Her eyes were too wide-set and heavy-lidded to be Aryan, but they were
not tilted; they were level. Her hair was not black, but chestnut and
curled or naturally very wavy. Her glance was tawny and aflame with
anger and excitement, furious upon the prostrate Barto. They were very
light-colored eyes, and they caught the sun in a blaze that made them
seem yellow.
Striking, she was a figure not of any ordinary kind. Her every aspect
told that she came of a culture unknown to me. She was evidently not
ignorant, but of a different way of life.
Looking into her eyes, appraising her interest in myself that had
brought her back, drinking in the immense appeal of her strangeness and
her evident gentility--the evidences of a past of cultivated living as
strange as her attire--I forgot the unconscious man at my feet.
Her skin was whiter than my own! Her arms were bruised purple where
Barto had clutched her. Then she spoke, in halting Korean:
"Is he dead?"
"No," I answered.
"Then he will live to meet a far worse fate! I know why you are here,
stranger, and I warn you! You are on a fool's errand! The Golden Goddess
is death for such as you!"