have burrowed so deep and bitten this great White Hood? He is
surely mad. Father of Cobras, I see nothing here to take away."

"By the Gods of the Sun and Moon, it is the madness of death
upon the boy!" hissed the Cobra. "Before thine eyes close I will
allow thee this favour. Look thou, and see what man has never
seen before!"

"They do not well in the Jungle who speak to Mowgli of favours,"
said the boy, between his teeth; "but the dark changes all, as I
know. I will look, if that please thee."

He stared with puckered-up eyes round the vault, and then lifted
up from the floor a handful of something that glittered.

"Oho!" said he, "this is like the stuff they play with in the
Man-Pack: only this is yellow and the other was brown."

He let the gold pieces fall, and move forward. The floor of the
vault was buried some five or six feet deep in coined gold and
silver that had burst from the sacks it had been originally
stored in, and, in the long years, the metal had packed and
settled as sand packs at low tide. On it and in it and rising
through it, as wrecks lift through the sand, were jewelled
elephant-howdahs of embossed silver, studded with plates of
hammered gold, and adorned with carbuncles and turquoises.
There were palanquins and litters for carrying queens, framed
and braced with silver and enamel, with jade-handled poles and
amber curtain-rings; there were golden candlesticks hung with
pierced emeralds that quivered on the branches; there were