And the story of the excavations at Mycenae reads more like some
well-devised chapter of fiction than a record of sober facts. Here,
those sanguine, half-childish dreams of buried treasure discovered in
dead men's graves, which seem to have a charm for every one, are more
than fulfilled in the spectacle of those antique kings, lying in the
splendour of their crowns and breastplates of embossed plate of gold;
their swords, studded with golden imagery, at their sides, as in some
feudal monument; their very faces covered up most strangely in golden
masks. The very floor of one tomb, we read, was thick with gold-
dust--the heavy gilding fallen from some perished kingly vestment; in
another was a downfall of golden leaves and flowers; and, amid this
profusion of thin fine fragments, were rings, bracelets, smaller
crowns as if for children, dainty butterflies for ornaments of
dresses, and that golden flower on a silver stalk--all of pure, [212]
soft gold, unhardened by alloy, the delicate films of which one must
touch but lightly, yet twisted and beaten, by hand and hammer, into
wavy, spiral relief, the cuttle-fish with its long undulating arms
appearing frequently.
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