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 studded images , five feet high , of forgotten gods , silver with jewelled eyes ; there were coats of mail , gold inlaid on steel , and fringed with rotted and blackened seed-pearls ; there were helmets , crested and beaded with pigeon 's - blood rubies ; there were shields of lacquer , of tortoise-shell and rhinoceros-hide , strapped and bossed with red gold and set with emeralds at the edge ; there were sheaves of diamond-hilted swords , daggers , and hunting-knives ; there were golden sacrificial bowls and ladles , and portable altars of a shape that never sees the light of day ; there were jade cups and bracelets ; there were incense-burners , combs , and pots for perfume , henna , and eye-powder , all in embossed gold ; there were nose-rings , armlets , head-bands , finger-rings , and girdles past any counting ; there were belts , seven fingers broad , of square-cut diamonds and rubies , and wooden boxes , trebly clamped with iron , from which the wood had fallen away in powder , showing the pile of uncut star-sapphires , opals , cat 's - eyes , sapphires , rubies , diamonds , emeralds , and garnets within . The White Cobra was right . No mere money would begin to pay the value of this treasure , the sifted pickings of centuries of war , plunder , trade , and taxation . The coins alone were priceless , leaving out of count all the precious stones ; and the dead weight of the gold and silver alone might be two or three hundred tons . Every native ruler in India to-day , however poor , has a hoard to which he is always adding ; and though , once in a long while , some enlightened prince may send off forty or fifty bullock-cart loads of silver to be exchanged for Government securities , the bulk of them keep their treasure and the knowledge of it very closely to themselves . But Mowgli naturally did not understand what these things meant . The knives interested him a little , but they did not balance so well as his own , and so he dropped them . At last he found something really fascinating laid on the front of a howdah half buried in the coins . It was a three-foot ankus , or elephant-goad -- something like a small boat-hook . The top was one round , shining ruby , and eight inches of the handle below it were studded with rough turquoises close together , giving a most satisfactory grip . Below them was a rim of jade with a flower-pattern running round it -- only the leaves were emeralds , and the blossoms were rubies sunk in the cool , green stone .
The rest of the handle was a shaft of pure ivory , while the point -- the spike and hook -- was gold-inlaid steel with pictures of elephant-catching ; and the pictures attracted XXXXX , who saw that they had something to do with his friend Hathi the Silent .
Mowgli Oho candlesticks daggers eye-powder girdles opals ruby sapphires wrecks