The Glyphs

 Extracted from Popular magazine, VOL. 54, September 20, 1919, pp. 1-56.

It brings the prehistoric past of a powerful nation of Central America vividly before you.

Cover page of the magazine illustrating the story

The Glyphs

By Roy Norton
Author of “The Phantom U-Boat," “The Liberator ,” Etc.

Who or what are glyphs? will be your first question, probably. They are records carved on stone by a lost people, in this case the Mayas of Central America, a race which achieved a civilization equal to that of the Egyptians, and thousands of years before them! In this story of Norton’s there is a little band of daring adventurers who, fascinated by the reading of rare glyphs, go halfway round the world in search of the hidden metropolis of the ancient Mayas. What happens to them savors of the Arabian Nights, only with them it is their courage and endurance which are the magic of the marvelous performance. There is no heroine except the lost city, but the adventurers fall in love with her for good and sufficient reasons.

(A Complete Novel)

CHAPTER I.

IT is impossible for me to decide, even to this day, whether the learned Doctor Morgano was an inspired genius or a crack-brained fool.

He had the strangest set of vices of any man I have ever known. If he desired something that he couldn’t buy, he had not the slightest hesitancy in stealing it. If he was in funds, which was seldom, he made it a rule to pay his debts, and then to give away all he had left to the most palpable leeches, tramps, vagabonds, and utterly worthless women of the Quartier Latin where I first met him.

When out of funds and low in credit he drank heavily of the cheapest drinks and—got drunk! In funds, and with credit restored, he became almost abstemious, drinking nothing but rare vintages, which he sipped in obscure cafés, thoughtfully smacking his lean lips and for long, ecstatic pauses eying the ceiling, the trees visible through open windows, and sometimes condescending to lower his eyes to the mere human side of the spectacle, even as a god given to lofty dreams might pityingly deign to observe the movements of ants in a neighboring hill. Sober he was silent, ascetic; drunk he sang Goliardic songs. He was a splendid liar. Sometimes I used to think he lied merely that he might entertain, enliven, or inspire those who sought the solace of his company. He lied about a hundred things; but, so far as I ever knew, never lied to save himself. If these be virtues, he merits a statue. If they are crimes, he should have been hanged before his progress was extended beyond the first quarter of his allotted span.

Personally, I don’t care much one way or the other, because I laughed at him, derided him; laughed with him, and now, unlike Antony, come not to bury this dead Cæsar, but to praise. I take the unsanctioned liberty because it was characteristic of him in life that whenever he stole anything he said so and therefore I am certain he would not object to this childishly frank recountal of our adventures. If he filched a tablecloth from the invitingly open window of a mansion on the decent side of the Seine and within an hour made of it a present to some gray-haired old concierge on the other side, he never neglected to inform the recipient that it was pilfered. Why, then, following his own self-imposed rule, shouldn’t I write? I presume that he is no longer alive, for doubtless he would have told the tale himself had he survived. I was too good a friend of his to neglect this habitual clearance of record now that he is dead. Hence my written accounting!

In was in 1912 that I returned to my old stamping ground in the Quarter from an expedition into and across Africa that was not entirely too legitimate, I am convinced, but an expedition in which I had been duped to lead the way by a bunch of presumably German barons who presumably wished to make a mere trip for exploration and sport. I have since learned that they were more interested in making maps than in the indulgence of the sporting instinct; but they paid all they agreed to pay—in fact, paid well. They sought and secured my services because they wanted an out-of-doors man, and I am that. They learned somehow, and how they learned I have never known, that I had been in most of the out-of-the-way places of the globe from the Arctic to Tibet, and from the Mountains of the Rif to the Mountains of the Moon; that I had been an ivory poacher in Africa, and a fur poacher in Siberia; that, to paraphrase the estimable Francois Villon, I was “handy with gun, guts, and grub.”

I earned the money they paid. Also I earned the quiet, semibohemian rest that followed in the beloved haunts of my youth—there in the graying majestic part of Paris where I am at home. And so, enough of myself summarized in this: that I was somewhat known, was considered an adventurer neither unscrupulous nor overly scrupulous, a man beginning to show white hair in a clipped mustache, a man beginning to have much tolerance for the weaknesses of other men, and capable of keeping his mouth shut concerning mere peccadillos, fantasies, and frailties. A man who had a little money, was not averse to taking legitimate chances for more, and was unafraid. No hero at all, you see, but just an ordinary individual such as may be found in similar places in any big city on earth from Liverpool to Lacadiva, Singapore to Seattle, or Peking to Paris.

Doctor Morgano was known in Rome, London, New York, Leipsic, Cairo, and Paris as an archæologist always out of a job. His specialty was deciphering hieroglyphics that other renowned professors and doctors couldn’t read, collecting money for the knowledge, writing learned treatises upon such subjects, and riotously spending the revenues thus gained.

He newer prospered, owing to his deficiencies. I use the last word charitably, perhaps; but the fact is that once a delegation of learned men from the Royal Society sought converse with him and went to Leipsic, where he declined to talk to them because he was playing pinochle in a beer garden; an agent for the Metropolitan Museum in New York went to Cairo to offer him a life job, which the doctor declined because he couldn’t part from association with a dirty old Arab mystic for whom he had conceived a liking; the Royal Museum offered him a place as a sort of honored curator, but he was at the moment engrossed in a profound study of the habits, systems, and social amenities of snails, and so couldn’t accept.

There you have the man. One who liked money to spend on others, but didn’t like to take much trouble to get it, but could be quite content if he hadn’t a centime in his purse; one who could be inordinately industrious in the study of a foolish hobby, but was too devilish lazy to make an honest living merely to pay his bills and be comfortable.

And this was the man who, on a summer’s night in 1912, came to the vacant chair on the opposite side of the little, black, marble-topped liqueur-stained table on the pave in front of the Pantheon Café and said, in his soft, broken, foreign-tainted English:

“Ah! It is Signor Henri Hallewell, for whom I have so long looked. It is the signor who is back from—ees eet the sun, moon, or some star? We shall drink if my friend has the money to pay. As for me—thee renowned Signor Doctore—must ordair no more until I have more money! But, the Signor Henri is my guest! Some day I shall pay him. Now, let’s have somesing vairy good to drink—somesing extraordinaire, because this is une grande occasion! I have to-day stolen from a private collection some tablets that have geeven to me thee secrits of a long-dead race! Ah! I am still ze maitre of fools!”

I couldn’t make much from this. The fact that he had stolen something he desired wasn’t sufficiently peculiar to arouse my interest or curiosity. I knew he’d steal anything he wanted and couldn’t otherwise get. He had no moral sense in regard to property. It was his if he could get away with it—a most simple and satisfying creed. I remember, however, that I was impressed with the premise that this must have been a particularly shocking theft from the fact that he talked to me in English; because on ordinary occasions he discoursed in the Italian tongue, with which I am, through early years spent in Italy, as much at home as was he. I spare you who may read this the tortuous winding and mispronunciation of his words, and, incidentally, spare myself the trouble of phonetic spelling, by a most liberal interpretation of what he said as he leaned across that tiny table and told me the story that started me off with him into a singular if not particularly interesting adventure. An adventure into tropical jungles; into places where miasma hung like a shroud of death to bar our steps where there were deadly things; where each serpeant carried the coup de grace behind its laden and waiting fangs; where each insect was the bearer of the keys to another world; where each human being was an enemy, and where a scratch from a thorn might hurl one to earth a writhing, tormented thing until death gave welcomed release.

“I have to-day discovered,” he said impressively, as he leaned across the table, “the key to the glyphs of Guatemala!” He waited for me to express my astonishment and appeared disappointed when I did not immediately enthuse.

“I’m mighty glad to hear that,” I said politely. “I didn’t know the keys had been lost. If the chap that lost them is liberal he should pay you well. I found a bunch of keys one time in Naples that——”

“By the love of our lady! Hear him jest! Hear him!” he muttered in an awed voice that carried the singular effect of a scream of outrage, and I knew by the fact that he spoke in his native tongue that he was actually shocked and talking of me as a third person. “I find the key to the symbols of a lost race—a race which has hitherto been in the darkness of past and unknown ages—the story of the old, old world, and he, this man, jests! I find that for which great minds have earnestly sought since the very days of Hernando Cortez and Las Casas, the lost hand for which in vain strove Brasseur de Bourburg to guide him in his research, and this man—this damned Philistine—gibes!”

Pitying him for his suffering and myself for my intense ignorance, I said: “Well, if you’ve found the key to something, and it’s worth keeping, or selling, worth hanging up or using, suppose you tell us about it. You’ve mentioned Cortez, the Spanish explorer of the sixteenth century, I presume. Also I know that old Las Casas was about as good a historian as he was peaceable friar; but I’ve never heard of this chap Brasseur de Bourburg. He’s a new one on me. Whom did he torture and, if he did, what’s it got to do with your stealing something for which you may get pinched? What has that to do with a key and with glyphs? Glyphs? What are glyphs, anyhow?”

“Glyphs, my friend,” he said, after sadly shaking himself and presumably at my expense ordering another drink, “glyphs are—are—carving on stones and other things. Carving that were made on stone by the lost races of the Central American isthmus—hieroglyphics of the Maya race there, of the Quicha race in Peru, and all those peoples who were civilized and old when Egypt was young. In vain for centuries have men tried to read them. In vain have they endeavored to lift the veil from that long-dead past—to read the history written in imperishable stone. And it is I—I—Morgano, who have accomplished where others failed!”

He leaned back, rounded his eyes, thumped his chest with both fists, and haughtily stared at me as if expecting me to get up and give three cheers or to pay the exaggerated deference due to a great conqueror!

But I didn’t. I yawned, much to his obvious contempt, and said: “Well? Go ahead. Tell us all about it. What has that to do with me? You don’t think I’m running an exploration society, do you?”

“I think,” he said hopelessly, “that you’re an incurable fool!” And then, after a moment’s deliberation: “No, I shouldn’t say that! I retract. I think you don’t understand. I think you are the one man I can trust who will help me. You know the ways of the inaccessible hills; of deserts, and of snows; of forests and of jungles! You know how to help me to get to the places where I must go. To where I, Doctor Morgano, the wasted, and despised, and dissolute, may read the secrets of the lost races of the world and perhaps fill in the lost pages of man’s life on this earth. You are the man who may be the instrument to recover much that knowledge has lost. You, the veteran adventurer, wise and experienced, I the man who would be lost, panic-stricken, mad, when removed from the concomitants of civilization as we know it. If I could but make you see; make you understand; make you appreciate the opportunity!”

He paused, despondently, as if appalled by the perplexing task of getting either an idea or enthusiasm through my skull, then suddenly brightened and leaned across to whisper: “Who knows? There might be treasure in it. The finding of long-hidden jewels, stores of golden ingots, great bars of silver! But,” he added hastily and harshly when he saw that I was at last fully interested, “the archæological treasures shall be mine! Mine, you understand, for it would not do for priceless relics to be sullied by falling into ignorant and profane hands!”

“Meaning mine, I suppose,” I said with some sarcasm.

“Of course I mean yours,” he had no hesitancy in replying. The doctor was never very polite.

I laughed. He didn’t seem to mind any more than did that historic philosopher mentioned by Rameses who merely considered the source of insult when kicked by a mule. And then, remembering that I could use considerable more money than I possessed, and that a man can scarcely retire for life on five or six thousand dollars, I began to ponder over what he had so astutely suggested. I recall that I was fascinated by a little pool of wine spilled on the black marble and that it reminded me of a black lake in the midst of a black jungle, a lake of death such as I had once seen in the heart of Africa and into whose sullen depths I had seen disappear for the last time the face of a friend. I can’t tell why I was so strangely affected by this flash of imagination; but I do know that I must have momentarily forgotten the doctor, for his voice startled me when he said: “Come, come! What is the matter?” For an instant I was bewildered and astonished by the fact that I was still here in Paris, that the table was still there, and that Doctor Morgano was staring at me in a puzzled way.

“Nothing, nothing!” I replied hastily.

“Mon Dieu! I thought you saw a ghost!” he exclaimed, and then reverting to his own enthusiasm: “It is better that we go to my rooms to talk. I will there show you something.”

“All right. Let’s go now,” I said, getting to my feet and—to be honest—rather eager to get away from that nasty little black pool that had so strangely disturbed me.

With an air of satisfaction, quite as if he regarded this as a step in advance along his path of enterprise, the doctor walked by my side and directed the way. He talked breathlessly, en route, of lost peoples, of the Atalantis theory that civilization sprang from the West instead of the East and that a continent had been submerged; that perhaps the seat of civilization had been along the great Panama Isthmus and the northern portion of South America; of archæological mysteries in Guatemala and Peru; of Aztecs and Mayas, Incas and Quichuas and a dozen people I had not thought of since being bored stiff by their recountal when cramming for my school examinations.

Indeed, so fast had I led the pace and so steadily had he talked that he was somewhat breathless when we came to the door of the tall old building in that narrow ancient street of the Rue Beaux Arts that straggles, narrow and obscure, away from the Rue Buonaparte. The big doors were still open and the concierge merely glared at us through the window, identified the doctor with a sniff that suggested that his rent was overdue, and we began to climb flight after flight of stone stairs, all in darkness save when lighted now and then by a wax match which my conductor scratched to assist me over treacherous portions of the ascent. The place smelled of garlic, of herbs, of fish, and of paints. From the fact that the doctor’s quarters were exactly under the tiles I surmised that he had not been in funds for some time. But evidently his gas bill had been paid, because the room was remarkably well lighted by an exceptionally good chandelier. I looked at it with admiration.

“I must have good lights for my work,” he explained when he saw my look. “That is a most excellent light. Excellent! Most excellent! Came from the house of Monsieur le Duc de Angoulême when it was being renovated. It was of far less importance that the duke rather than a savant be without such a light.” He chuckled as if amused. “The workman who stole it for me asked but five francs for it!”

I had time to look about me. The place was like a junk shop. It had more worthless plunder in it than I had even seen collected outside a museum. It was the untidiest room I ever saw, and I have dwelt, storm-bound, in an Eskimo barrabara which I had hitherto regarded as the limit of dirt. Actually, the floor was so covered with papers, books, chunks of stone, and pieces of marble, that one followed a trail to get to a chair from which the doctor unceremoniously dumped a pile of manuscript and invited me to be seated. His worktable was littered with dishes and the remnants of a home-cooked meal. This débris he made into a pile and deposited on the floor, after which he unlocked his desk and produced therefrom, carefully swathed, several stone tablets.

“Behold,” he cried, “the Glyphs! The key to the break in the history of the world.”

They looked to me like a few slabs on which an apprentice to a tombstone maker had been practicing his chisels; but the doctor was so evidently enthused and happy over them that I hadn’t the cruelty to bring him back to earth.

“To think,” he said with something like tragic agitation, “that these priceless, peerless jewels have been for years, perhaps hundreds of years, in the filthy hands of some idle, ignorant ass of a curio collector, while scientists such as I have unearthed buried cities, lost temples, removed mountains of sand to find them! Braved deserts and death, endured hardships untold, while all the time these were reposing here in Paris! Faugh! Sapristi! ’Tis enough to make one doubt the existence of a Supreme Being. There they are! Gaze upon them.”

I tried to appear spellbound. He actually fell to caressing them with his long, lean, unclean fingers. For the moment he was certainly mad. His eyes, wildly lighted and glowing, betrayed insanity as surely as I’m here. His leathery, clean-shaven lips twisted as if he were mentally uttering an incantation to strange gods. He looked like Mephistopheles gloating over an acquisition of lost souls.

“These,” he said, patting them, “are key stones; as if some tutor had cut a full alphabet to instruct children how to read!”

I thought to myself that those ancient schoolmasters must have been a lot of bone-heads not to have been able to invent simpler alphabets than those. I was deucedly glad I didn’t have to go to school in those times; for I’m convinced I should have remained illiterate all my life.

“Look to me like a lot of funny faces made accidentally by drunken slugs on a garden path,” I said, and he opened his lips to anathematize me, I think, when we were suddenly aware that some one with heavy feet was ascending the stairs. The doctor abruptly, nay hurriedly, thrust his stone quarry back into the drawers of the desk and listened intently. The concierge’s voice could be heard volubly discoursing, and then there was a breathless moment while we listened to learn if they were passing our door; but they didn’t. There was a sharp, staccato rapping, and the archæologist with a frown made his way to the door and opened it. A large, fat sergeant de ville stood there puffing after his long climb, and wheezed out an interrogatory “Doctor Paolo Morgano?”

“Yes. What do you wish?” replied my host with surprising coolness and sang-froid, although I’ll bet his heart was thumping a tattoo on his lean ribs.

“I should like to come inside. Official business, monsieur,” he said, somewhat pompously.

“Why certainly. Come in,” the doctor replied, throwing the door wide and beckoning a graceful invitation to the policeman.

His manner appeared to somewhat overawe the officer, which takes a bit of doing in Paris, as I have sometimes learned to my cost. But so frank, so cool was this old rascal that he could have befooled a much smarter policeman than that fat sergeant.

“Some curios have been stolen from the house of Monsieur Beauvaix in the Bois.”

“Oh,” said the doctor thoughtfully. “Monsieur Beauvaix the—let me think—— Ah! the man who made a fortune out of soap fat and who is the biggest fool of a collector in all Paris! I remember now. He asked me to inspect and catalogue his precious stuff and after one look I told him it was not worth his while. That was rubbish—all rubbish! Who could have been fool enough to steal anything from him?”

“That is what my superior wishes to learn,” replied the officer dryly. “He sent me to notify all collectors in Paris to watch for them. The objects stolen were some stone tablets——”

The doctor suddenly doubled over with laughter, much to my astonishment as well as the agent’s, and then, to my much greater surprise, said: “Ah! that explains it. Wait a moment, monsieur. Just a moment.” And then he actually walked to the desk, pulled the glyphs out and held them toward the policeman, who blinked at them, handled them, and said as if to himself: “Yes, one had a carving that looked like a sheep’s head and another had snakes and—— Perhaps Monsieur le Doctor will tell me how these came into his possession?” he ended rather sternly.

“Vraiment! Easily,” declared the doctor without the slightest sign of annoyance, or anything other than of extreme candor. “A gamin stopped me on the street at the foot of my stairs the other night and said he had heard that I sometimes purchased funny stones. He showed me these. I bought them there in the darkness for two francs. Ha! Ha! that gamin got my two francs for nothing. He fooled me—Doctor Paolo Morgano—member of a dozen distinguished archæological societies, author of a thousand monographs, originator of the Morganic theory of Egyptian decadence.” Again he doubled over with a pretense of mirth that was sufficiently well simulated to fool even me. I wondered if he had not actually been “stringing” me all that evening. I was convinced of it when he carelessly shoved the tablets into the policeman’s hands and said, sarcastically: “You are most welcome to them. Take them back to the soap man; but for heaven’s sake, monsieur, don’t tell any one about me. It would cause a laugh in every renowned society in Europe that I, Doctor Paolo Morgano, should have been bilked of two francs by a mere gamin of the streets of Paris, an impudent little ragamuffin of a thief who might as well have sold me a parcel of bricks or cobblestones!”

He actually got away with it. The sergeant de ville laughed boisterously. I pretended to do likewise. The doctor slapped the policeman on the back as if overcome with mirth. The concierge opened the door and stared in as if wishing to hear the joke. And then the officer carelessly tied a piece of string around the tablets, Doctor Morgano assisted him to wrap them in an old copy of Le Matin, and, still chuckling at such a fine joke, the sergeant apologized for disturbing so renowned a savant, and disappeared. We were motionless and listening until the steps died away down the well of the staircase. The doctor went to the door, opened it, tiptoed out into the darkness, and, I think, hung over the upper banister. I wondered if this madman had been having a little fun with me, and was half inclined to resentment until he returned, carefully shut the door, and threw a pair of frenzied, gesticulatory hands into the air above his head and burst into a stream of Italian objurgation.

“Think of it! Those precious stones—worth their weight in diamonds or pearls—being carried through the streets by a policeman and back to the house of that father of all asses! That unspeakable, impossible ignoramus of a soap-fat boiler, Beauvaix! What a tragedy! Tragedy! Suppose something should happen to them? Suppose they should be lost?”

He clutched his fingers through his hair and threatened to pick a few handfuls, and I thought it best to calm him.

“Steady, doctor! Steady! Don’t take it too much to heart. Beauvaix will doubtless let you look at them again,” I remonstrated.

He suddenly relaxed, grinned, and said: “I don’t need to look at them again to know their semblance. I took care to make a carbon rubbing and two exact copies of them in indelible ink.” He paused and then added quite hopefully, “And, furthermore, I can steal them again when I want them. They’ll be safer there, perhaps, than in this room. Old Beauvaix is like a custodian at the Cluny Musée—doesn’t know the value of what he keeps, but keeps it well! I think he suspected me. Otherwise I’d not have given them up so easily. You can readily understand,” he said almost apologetically, “that it wouldn’t have done at all for me to be arrested just now when time is so essential. We must hurry to our enterprise. We must!”

“What’s the rush?” I asked in plain Americanese.

“Rush? I suppose that means haste. What is the haste, monsieur my friend? Simply this: that I am nearly sixty years of age; that in me reposes a great secret; that my life is to-day more precious than that of any man on earth because of the knowledge that is herein contained!”

And he thumped his head with his knuckles as if to impress upon me the idea that he was thumping a treasure box of exceeding worth. He glared at me with an enormous solemnity, his round eyes, large, black, and inscrutable-looking as if struggling to pop out from the confining caverns of thatched, overhanging eyebrows which twitched nervously above them.

“Now, the tablets have left my possession. That is settled. You seek treasure. I seek knowledge. You know the material side of how to live while penetrating into savage places. I don’t. You know what such expeditions cost. I don’t. So it seems that we are partners.”

I wasn’t so sure of this. I hadn’t fully taken it on, although I admit that it sounded mighty attractive. I’ve always maintained a sort of sneaking love for the idea of hidden treasure, ever since, as a boy, I read “Treasure Island.” What boy with red blood in his veins hasn’t? It’s no disgrace, and isn’t disreputable, as far as I can reason.

“But,” I objected dubiously, “I don’t have the remotest idea of how much it would cost to get to Guatemala. I don’t even know what the steamer fares would be. I’ve never been there. Then there is the question of labor—packers and such—a safari, as we call it in Africa. All those details mean money. How are we to get it?”

“Oh, that,” said Doctor Morgano with an air of boredom, “is nothing. That is for you to accomplish. Maybe you have it. Maybe it could be borrowed from somebody. Maybe you could get it from some bank. I have noticed that banks most always have a lot of money around in trays behind glass cases. It’s no good there. Why couldn’t you go and get some of that? Perhaps if you told them you wanted a little of it for an urgent need, they’d let you have some of it. Of course, if we find a lot of treasure stored away somewhere, we’d give it back to them and a lot more beside. We can’t afford to be ungenerous or stingy, can we?”

As if all obstacles had been successfully negotiated, he bade me good night. It was not until, still in a maze, I was halfway down the five flights of stairs that the full measure of his absurdities dawned upon me, and I had to lean against the wall and laugh.

CHAPTER II.

Sometimes I wonder if we should have ever made that trip had not the charcutier kicked J. Dalrymple Wardrop’s dog. Also had not Beni Hassan Azdul been there to observe the aforementioned kick. Also had I not been there to remonstrate with the pork butcher and, when called a foul name, administer a kick to him. Hence enter into this bald, plain chronicle, the persons of J. Dalrymple Wardrop, afterward lovingly known as Wardy; Beni Hassan Azdul, familiar as Benny, and Monty, the dog. And let it be further explained that the dog’s cognomen was thus bestowed because his owner had won him through a private game of piquet at Monte Carlo. I never knew how he won Beni Hassan Azdul. Perhaps it was out in Bedouin districts of the Sahara desert. Anyhow, he had him.

I felt better after booting the charcutier; because the kick he had handed the dog was gratuitous, and I am one of those persons who aren’t quite positive but that dogs have souls of sorts. I was somewhat surprised by the hurried appearance of Beni Hassan Azdul, who hastened up and, in the gloom, proffered me a rather wicked-looking knife with the whispered suggestion that I cut the charcutier’s throat and thus make a complete job of it. A crowd threatened to gather, attracted by the lamentations of the charcutier. I have in my time played a deal of football not without some local fame. I know how to kick! But I don’t quite know how to face a crowd of infuriated toy venders, shoe-lace merchants, dealers in post cards and the latest toy novelties. I thrust the nearest one away and beat a strategic retreat in the direction of my favorite café.

Considerably less heated, in fact, quite calm and placid, I was sitting there considering Doctor Morgano, glyphs, ancient civilizations and the marvelous coiffure of a young lady who smoked a cigar at an adjoining table, when I was disturbed by a deep voice that spoke behind me in English—and to hear one’s own tongue in a foreign land is always a surprise—“Pardon me. I don’t know your name; but it doesn’t in the least matter. Thank you for kicking the man who kicked my dog. If there is any other person you wish kicked, it is my pleasure to reciprocate and I am at your disposal!”

He was an enormous man, six feet six in his stockinged feet and built in perfect proportion. There was no mistaking his class or nationality—quite evidently an Englishman of the upper classes, as they call them in a country where class does represent a distinction, after all. He wore a monocle which seemed so firmly fixed in his face that I fancied it would stick there were he awake or asleep, drunk or sober, and it is creditable to my first observation that later familiarity confirmed the estimate. He wore a singularly individual garb as if to defy comment, fashions, and, indeed, the entire world of conventionalities. A “deerstalker” hat dented down the center and cocked at a defiant, belligerent angle, surmounted his finely shaped head. His golfing suit was startlingly squared and checkered, but expensive and well-woven tweed that must have come from the real old spinners’ looms. His shoes were of the type that cost more money than I could ever afford, and that I’m not certain I should order if I were a millionaire, being heavy soled, with huge, punched uppers. His stockings were of rare old homespun, but with a defiant border rolled downward in a broad expanse of reds, yellows, purples, greens, and blues. His hands, that I was later to learn were so practical, strong, and capable, were concealed beneath a heavy pair of expensive dog-hide gloves, and they held a cane of twisted elephant hide that immediately arrested my scrutiny. In fact, I looked at the walking stick with a sharp sense of recognizing something familiar before my eyes lifted to his monocle; to his strong face; to the graying beard that, well trimmed, concealed a combative, stubborn, resolute chin.

“Why the thanks?” said I, disturbed. “It’s nothing. I always kick a man who kicks a dog—unwarranted. I presume you refer to——”

And then I saw, standing behind him, the Arabic person who in my street encounter had tendered a knife; but now the high, thin, sensitive nose was twitching in response to its nostrils, and as perfect a set of teeth as I have ever seen were exposed by a faint smile.

“Benny tells me that you are the one who resented an insult to Monty. Monty is my dog,” he explained. “Incidentally, Benny is my man. They’re both friends of mine—Monty and Ben. I back, uphold, defend—sometimes support—my friends!” There was a dry flavor of humor, like the intangible bouquet of old wines, in his last explanation that impelled me to stand up and ask him for the privilege of his company. I’m glad, now, that I did.

“Let us celebrate,” said I, “such a remarkable occurrence. It’s not every day that a man has the opportunity to defend a defenseless beast. There should be a police court, learned doctors of the law, eloquent advocates, renowned compilers of judicial decisions, to protect the rights of dogs. Please join me.”

I had expected that his Arabic follower would at least hover near, but with a gentle admonitory wave of his hand my new friend dismissed not only him, but the dog. The latter went reluctantly. I think there was a piece of string tied round his neck, which was occasionally jerked by his conductor.

Amused, I consented. And I was speedily to learn that this was no amateur in ordering, but a real connoisseur who not only knew what he wanted but how to get it. Lots of us know what we want, but getting it is another matter. J. D. W. had both gifts. I sat eying that twist of elephant hide. My host sat eying me.

“You are interested in that?” he suddenly asked, holding it up for my better inspection.

“Somewhat,” I replied. “It’s about the best one I’ve ever seen. I’ve tried to make them, very unsuccessfully, I fear.”

“You have been in Africa?”

“Yes—across it twice.”

He betrayed more interest than hitherto, which made me believe that up to that time he had been merely paying what he considered to be Monty’s indebtedness, but was now curious concerning myself. He fixed me with that monocle of his and then suddenly leaned back and chuckled.

“By Jove!” he exclaimed. “Who’d have thought it! You’re the man I saw at Niobrara—the man with the magnificent red whiskers that flowed down around his chest. Same man! Man with the red whiskers! Can’t be mistaken. And—wait a moment—your name is—is—Hallewell!”

It was my turn to be astonished. I was certain that I had never seen him before. One couldn’t possibly forget such a man as he. He must have surmised from my look of astonishment that I was cudgeling my memory, and added: “No, I didn’t meet you. Saw you through a window. Friend of mine said, ‘That’s Hallewell. Feller who goes where others don’t. Shoots with his eyes shut and scores a bull. I’ve an idea he’s a bad egg.’”

“Thanks,” said I dryly, and my host laughed as if amused.

“Perhaps you will not consider it impertinent, inasmuch as you know my name, that I am somewhat curious to know yours?”

“Not at all! Not at all!” And he thereupon took a card from his pocket and handed it to me. The name was very familiar. I knew much of him; knew that he had once been a Ceylon tea planter, afterward a big-game hunter, something of an explorer, much of an adventurer, and that men spoke well of him. Also that he was a man of considerable wealth, able to gratify all his whims. It is odd to me, in recalling that meeting, that I did not bestow a moment’s thought on Doctor Morgano until after more than an hour’s friendly conversation, when my new friend asked most politely, if I intended returning to Africa or was bound for the north pole.

“No,” replied I, “neither has entered my mind. In fact, I am somewhat unsettled because—well, because a friend of mine wished me to accompany him into the jungles of Guatemala. He wishes to look at ruins.”

“Guatemala? Humph! That’s where those Aztec Johnnies lived. Funny old temples and—— By Jove! I’d like to come along with you! I’m rather fed up with Paris. Been wondering what to do. Eh?”

This was so unexpected that I was slightly embarrassed as to how to reply. I wasn’t exactly certain that, everything else being arranged, the doctor would care to have him accompany us. Moreover, I don’t believe that up to that minute I had thoroughly resolved to go myself. I wasn’t certain that Doctor Morgano was anything other than a fairly harmless old lunatic who, while sincere, was fooling himself. Suddenly the thought entered my mind that it might be best for Wardrop to talk with the archæologist and draw his own conclusions. First, there would be some sport in seeing these two together, and, second, if anything came of it, I couldn’t be held to blame.

“The truth is,” I said, “that it is rather beyond my authority to arrange this expedition. It originated in the mind of Doctor Paolo Morgano. If he were to decide that——”

“All right! Let’s go see him,” said Wardrop, immediately snapping his fingers for the waiter and demanding his bill. I had no time to protest before, the indebtedness paid, my host was on his feet towering so high above other men that all eyes were on him. Evidently he was a man of quick decision and action. I grinned to myself with anticipatory enjoyment of the shock he should sustain when ushered into that queer domicile of the doctor’s; but my grin was wasted. The big man trudged placidly after me up the six flights of dark, dirty stone stairs, as if expecting to find a savant in such quarters, and when the doctor admitted us, did not show the slightest sign of surprise, curiosity, or disgust. Indeed, he appeared rather to enjoy sitting on a mummy case, quite as if he had sat on many such before I introduced them.

“Mr. Wardrop,” I said, “is known to me by reputation. He wishes to go with us to Guatemala.”

“Is he going to pay our expenses?” the doctor asked before I could get any further, and James Dalrymple Wardrop’s monocle nearly fell from his eye, and he looked at the door, then at us, wondering if he had fallen into some new “holdup” game.

“I hadn’t mentioned that trifling matter to him,” I replied.

“But you told him about the glyphs?”

“Not a word! He likes to hunt, explore, visit jungles, and so forth.”

“Then he must be insano!” said the doctor, eying the placid visitor much as if he were a new chunk of stone. “He wishes to go to—merely for—impossible!”

“Quite true, I assure you,” said the big man, seemingly amused. “But—perhaps I’m not asking too much if you will explain something of the nature of this—er—this expedition, doctor.”

“Got any money?” asked the doctor in about the same tone that he might have used if asking for a match.

“Some,” said Wardrop. “Depends on what for.”

“Ah, my friend, you are the man we have been seeking. By the shades of Pharaoh, it is fate! We have knowledge—you have money. What a happy combination. You shall come. You shall have the privilege of sharing in the greatest scientific discovery of your generation. You shall become renowned as——”

I saw some signs of either alarm, amusement, or withdrawal on our visitor’s face and decided that it was time to interrupt.

“Doctor, perhaps you had best let me explain. Mr. Wardrop, Doctor Morgano, of whom you have doubtless heard as a distinguished archæologist, believes he has discovered the key to the hieroglyphics sculptured upon the ruins in Guatemala and Yucatan, which, as you also doubtless know, have been unsolvable mysteries heretofore. He—pardon, Doctor Morgano, let me finish, please! As I was about to say, Mr. Wardrop, the doctor wishes to go there to conduct his investigations. He confided in me because he thinks he might need the services of some one a trifle more accustomed to exploration, travel, jungles, snakes, Indians, et cetera, than he is. His inducement to me was that we might find treasure, and that my recompense should be to share in that. All he asks is for means to study those ruins, and interpret lost history. I have not the money to equip the expedition unassisted. If you are interested, and care to take such extraordinary risks of ever being reimbursed for your share of the outlay, I would cheerfully share with you on any terms we might agree upon. That is the plain statement of the situation.”

Wardrop shifted his eyes from mine to the doctor, who was now prancing up and down and cracking his finger joints with impatience. For a time he studied the doctor, then I think smiled behind his beard, and addressed himself to me.

“Do you really think there is any hope of discovering buried treasure?” he demanded ironically.

“Not one chance in a million!” I asserted, whereupon the doctor went into a sudden paroxysm of rage, shook his fists in the air, called upon the gods to witness that in me they were beholding the greatest of fools, and then roared, in Italian, with his face not more than eighteen inches from mine and exhaling passion and garlic strangely intermixed: “Is that the way to induce a man to advance capital for our search? Pah! Poof! You do tell the signor that there is nothing in it! That you think there is no treasure! That I, Paolo Morgano, known everywhere as a savant, and accepted, with honors, by a score of learned societies, do what you call in your barbaric English ‘speak through my hat!’”

He might have said more but that he was interrupted by a stentorian roar of laughter. J. Dalrymple Wardrop was rocking to and fro on his mummy case overcome by enjoyment. It was palpable that he thoroughly understood Italian, a fact which I afterward knew.

The doctor retired sulkily to his chair and threw himself into it with outsprawled feet in an attitude of hopeless dejection and resignation.

“Go on. Continue. Spoil everything,” he said to me with a glare.

“Hallewell, do you think he’s really got what he thinks he has—the key to the hieroglyphics?” Wardrop asked me as if the doctor were not even present.

“Oh, no doubt of that,” I declared. “He’s peculiar but—well, he knows his job. He’s a whale in archæology—no small fry.”

“I thank you for that,” interjected the doctor acridly. “I am at least a leviathan and not a shrimp!”

“And you think there is a chance for some sport?” continued Wardrop, paying not the slightest heed to the irate doctor.

“Of sorts. Maybe not much. I don’t know. I’ve never been there and that’s the only reason why I’m interested,” I admitted, telling nothing but plain truth. He grinned sympathetically and his eyes sparkled like those of an adventurous boy.

“How much would the whole trip cost?” he asked with a grain of evident caution.

“Anywhere from ten to a hundred thousand francs,” I said, giving it a nice comfortable margin. “I can stand twenty thousand myself. If we find anything in the way of treasure, which, as I said, is doubtful, we might cut it into three portions, although the doctor says he doesn’t seek money.”

He got to his feet and stretched his arms as if to adjust himself into his coat.

“All right,” he said. “I’m in on it. I can start to-morrow morning if it suits your plans. Where do we outfit? On this side, or at some port across the Caribbean? You’ll have to look after that part of it because that sort of thing annoys me.”

I was somewhat knocked off my pins by this unexpected, off-handed acceptance of so indefinite an adventure. I was yet to learn that this man made all decisions as quickly and unhesitatingly. But now he was assailed by the doctor. I can call it nothing less than an assault, for the archæologist leaped to his feet, seized the visitor’s hand, twisted it, wrung it, and then cast it aside as if it were wet linen being flung on the grass to dry.

“Ah, comrade!” he shouted. “Partner in the mystery of the ages! We shall share the joy of unfolding history like the leaves of a sealed book. Mon Dieu! Think! Think what it means to know what they did, those lost nations! Where they went; who ruled them; their habits; their hopes; their strange worships! You are sympatico. This hard-headed Henri is cold. A man who sees nothing that he can not touch, handle, barter, or throw aside. But—ah, forgeeve me, friend!” he cried, suddenly rushing toward me. “It is the heart of gold but with the head that sees no visions! The practical man. At what hour do we start to-morrow?”

I think he was vastly distressed when I explained that there were many things to be thought of and arranged; many purchases to be made; much knowledge to be acquired before we could start. Also that steamships didn’t run daily to the Isthmian coasts and ports. I was glad of an excuse to get away from him, and accompanied Wardrop down the stairs and to a quiet retreat where I could tell him all that I knew of the quest, of Doctor Morgano’s discovery.

The milk cans were rattling over the cobblestones of old Paris when we parted company in the morning.

CHAPTER III.

When it came down to the practical side of our venture, the doctor didn’t know a single fact regarding Guatemala that could be of the slightest assistance to me. I sometimes doubt if he had any very exact knowledge as to its location. All that he knew about it was that it was some place where there were jungles, and that it had numerous ruins. He could tell a lot about those. Wardrop knew exactly where it was, and how to get there, but didn’t care to be bored with investigations as to its climate or what sort of equipment we should carry. He knew all about big-game shooting and had made some most extraordinary trips; but always he had left it to some one else to get the outfits together. It’s a fact that, sitting one night in a London club, he got interested in Lhassa, which was then a Forbidden City, walked to his apartments, where he arrived at three a.m., decided he would like to go there, and at five a.m. took a train from Charing Cross with nothing but a hand valise containing a change of linen, three cases of rifles and shot guns, and a bass viol. Had I known this latter caprice before we started, I should have jibbed; but I didn’t.

Fortunately for the party I found a Guatemalean in the steamship office who did know a little about his own country, and who gave me much advice—most of it bad. But it enabled me to purchase a lot of plunder that afterward proved useful; and a lot that didn’t. I never knew until we reached the dock at Cherbourg, where we were to board a tramp steamer, that Wardrop was taking Benny with him. Also a bass viol in its case, which took up more room than a small moving van. Furthermore, he had a portable bath tub, a motion-picture camera that neither he nor any other of us ever knew how to operate, and a gramophone. The only joyous possession he left behind was his dog, the reason for that being that he didn’t care to have Monty suffer any hardships. I think he put him in a boarding house.

Doctor Morgano’s luggage consisted of a tin cylinder filled with maps, and a dozen notebooks; but his waistcoat bulged. One upper pocket contained a toothbrush and a razor, the other a shaving stick and some tooth soap.

“About luggage, doctor,” I asked solicitously, when he stepped off the train, “I suppose your trunk was checked through to here?”

“Trunk? Trunk? I have no trunk,” he replied.

“But what about changes of linen, extra equipment of that sort?” I asked hopefully.

“Never thought of them!” he said, looking troubled. “But—what do they matter? It is a great quest, my friend. That is all that counts now.” And he waved his hands as if dismissing an entirely immaterial obstacle. Wardrop roared with delight. I could have cursed fluently; but we fortunately had time to buy the doctor a few things for the voyage before the steamer sailed.

And in time it did, with our menagerie aboard. We were the sole voyagers. Wardrop was too seasoned a traveler to be at all disconcerted by the sea, and his man Benny might have been a sailor. The doctor was too much absorbed in the books he had brought aboard at Cherbourg to have time for seasickness, and we made a propitious start. It is true that when Wardrop first tried the bass viol the crew was panic-stricken; but I can’t blame the men. So was I. I rushed to his cabin—stalked it—to learn the cause of the trouble. Wardrop was sawing away with evident pleasure. He couldn’t play at all.

“Why do you do it?” I asked solicitously.

“Because it kicks up such an infernal noise,” he replied, which was all the satisfaction I ever got. And I honestly believe he played it for that sole reason. And so, in time, we came within sight of Barrios. We got our outfit together and checked it in a wretched wooden hotel to the accompaniment of the humming of mosquitoes that seemed to be a part and fit into that mosaic of swamp and houses that was reached by wooden bridges. We thanked Heaven when we reached Livingston, which lay clean, well ordered, and white on its low bluff. But in conversation with some of the residents, I began to wonder if our outfit was quite such as we required. It appeared that all that portion of Guatemala where there were ruins was about as much of a wilderness as Piccadilly Circus in London, or the Place de l’Opera in Paris. However, there was nothing for it but to continue this journey of wild exploration, and so we shipped the stuff and took a railway train to the nearest point by Quirigua, where the doctor said he would first attack this lost civilization of which he could no longer speak without tears in his eyes.

We got there all right because it was but fifty-seven miles from Barrios. We put up at a hotel, where Wardrop passed hours in oiling his stock of weapons, and Benny took his first lesson in that accursed American game of draw poker. The doctor was wildly excited.

I shall never forget our first trip into the wilderness.

We got a permit from an American fruit company that owned it. We took a sort of cab from the manager’s office, and drove through a magnificent plantation until we reached what might have been an exquisite tropical park. The big ceibas and other trees were rivaled by the size of banana plants. The roads and paths were very nice. I looked for the band stand but couldn’t find it. I hope they have built it by now. Also, some sort of a refreshment bar might assist other explorers in that terrifying spot. James Dalrymple Wardrop, sitting with a gun on his knees, grinned malevolently when he descended from our conveyance and sought a nicely sheltered path which should lead us to the archæological director of research in the long-dead city of Quirigua, of which the doctor had talked constantly for the preceding week.

We met the director. He was a gentleman all right, and an archæologist of distinction. He had a lot of plans for excavation that he was carrying out. I think the doctor would, in his delight at meeting a kindred spirit, have unbosomed his secret if I had not opportunely stepped on his toe. The director showed us where they had begun to dig out a lot of old ruins on Temple Court. There were several very nice tramways there to carry away the rubbish, and already they had unearthed spine stuff that looked to me like chunks of stone, but over which the doctor threatened to weep large tears of excitement. Wardrop yawned, and I determined then and there to decoy the doctor to some place where we could have a few minutes undisturbed conversation. It was after we had returned to our quarters and the doctor and I were alone.

“Are you going to tell that professor chap there at the ruins what you have discovered?” I asked pointedly.

“Science, my friend, preserves no secrets,” replied the doctor grandiosely.

“All right, that settles it!” said I. “You can stay here. I’ll get Wardrop and find out when the next seamer sails.”

“Why?” the doctor queried, blinking his eyes.

“Why just this: Wardrop came over here for sport, adventure, exploration, and all that sort of thing. I came over here because I hoped you had the secret to where the chaps who carved all those rocks hid their boodle when they moved on, or died, or were massacred, or whatever it was that wiped them out. It’s not fair to us to rob us of our chances,” I concluded, in no very good humor.

The doctor seemed to consider this for a long time.

“I’ll promise,” he said, “provided you keep away from me! You have no knowledge of the important things of life. You are too unimaginative. But there is no reason why I shouldn’t keep what I know to myself until your claims are satisfied. Understand?”

“Yes, I understand,” I said, secretly pleased by his promise, for I knew that he would keep his word. But it looked as if Wardrop and I might remain there a long, long time while our partner in enterprise luxuriated in ruins.

“Hereafter,” the doctor announced, “I shall conduct some private explorations. I have engaged the services of a Maya Indian named Ixtual to assist me.”

“What does he cost and who is to pay him?” I queried, somewhat ironically, I fear.

“I think I promised him a dollar a day; but have forgotten the exact figures. And you, of course, will pay him, because I have no money,” replied the doctor, airily dismissing the subject. “Oh, by the way, he is waiting outside for me now. I must be going.”

I had no chance to protest, but accompanied the doctor to the door. There, standing by the side of a pillar, I saw for the first time Ixtual. Lean and lithe, his body and pose suggested the very jaguar, or American tiger, that his ancestors had held to be the king of beasts. He was as straight as a pampas plume on a windless day, yet as ready to quiver and move. I think that I must have appraised him with a careless eye that took in his proportions first, even as a horseman glances admiringly at the form of a beautiful animal before studying its head, and then with something akin to a start, my eyes met his. I have never seen such in a human head! Veiled, they seemed, but filled with unutterable qualities; grief, power, ambition, disdain, courtesy, kindliness, and cruelty were all brooding there in their somber depths. His face was finely and resolutely featured—finer cut, indeed, than that of any Indian I had ever met. I felt that he had measured me in one swift, flashing survey, and then he gravely bowed to me, and turned away with the little doctor. I stood watching them depart, strangely disturbed.

“What an extraordinary man!” I exclaimed aloud, thinking that Wardy had come up behind me.

“That exactly describes him,” replied a voice behind me, and I turned to discover that it was the manager for the fruit company, who, as he sometimes did, had dropped in to pay us a visit. He, too, was staring contemplatively at the doctor and his companion with a speculative frown.

“That is one man—that chap Ixtual—I don’t quite understand and never shall,” he said thoughtfully. “I’ve never quite made him out. The Maya Indians that come down from up around Coban are the best and most industrious laborers I can hire. I pay them higher wages than have ever been paid here. I like them. I house some of them; but this Indian Ixtual has never yet worked for me. I don’t know what it is. He never works but always has money enough to pay his bills—if he ever makes any—which I doubt! The others seem to pay him a mysterious sort of deference. He always strikes me as a cross between an irreconcilable savage and a perfect gentleman, if you can dope out what I mean.”

“That’s about the way he impressed me,” I agreed as we went inside to find Wardy.

Three or four days went by with nothing at all interesting developing from the doctor’s new and individual efforts, save that while prodding around one day at his behest Ixtual was bitten by one of the small venomous snakes with which the country abounds, and, I doubt not, would have begun to chant his death song had not the doctor applied a tourniquet, gashed the wound, sucked the poison therefrom, and applied an antitoxin. Inasmuch as the recipient of that sort of snakely attention usually hastened to the pearly gates, I think that Ixtual thereafter regarded the doctor as a medicine man beyond compare. Either that or—I don’t know what tie developed between them that caused the taciturn Maya to become the savant’s shadow. Perhaps it was the fact that the doctor speedily developed a surprising facility in the Maya tongue which, in the course of his researches, he had assiduously studied for years and now required nothing more than practice for perfection. Or could it have been that Ixtual himself, for reasons of his own, perhaps as the last hope of his race, had been striving, with laborious pathos, to interpret the long-lost meaning of those strange records and symbols? I presume I shall never know.

Yet I do know this, that when, on a hot mid-afternoon, the doctor, hatless, begrimed with dirt, burst into the room where Wardy and I were playing piquet, Ixtual was at his heels, dark, haughty, and vainly striving to coneal a pronounced exultation.

“I’ve found it!” the doctor cried, shaking a paper covered with rude drawings. “I've found what is probably the last stone ever cut before Quirigua became secondary. The Maya chronology was based on Katuns which numbered seven thousand two hundred days; or nearly twenty years each. Twenty Katuns constituted a cycle. Thus the temple which my scientific colleague is now excavating was built in 9.19.0.0.0:9 Ahau 19 Mol, of Maya records, which would be about the year 320 A. D. of ours. Now, you see in those times this particular place was devoted to human sacrifices. Was called the “Place of Sacrifice” for the nation, as each cornice of a temple proclaimed in sculptured hieroglyphics.”

He had been raving in his rapid Italian but was now interrupted by Wardy’s drawling voice.

“Pardon me, doctor. While I do speak and understand some Italian, you go too fast for me. You use words that are unknown to my vocabulary.”

The doctor at first threatened a frenzy, then, catching sight of Ixtual’s inquiring look, seemed suddenly and unaccountably to feel the necessity for restraint. He folded the paper and put it in his pocket. He looked at his watch, at his grimy hands, and then, turning to Ixtual, said something in the Maya tongue that caused Ixtual to bow obediently, almost deferentially, and leave the room. The doctor watched until the Indian was well on his way, then turned to us and in muttered French said: “I told him we would work no more to-day. I sent him back to put away the tools and bring my hat. He must not know all that I have learned. I have found what I think is the last record of Quirigua, which I surmise was abandoned with the advent to power of some more enlightened priest-king who declared against further human sacrifices, or because the place was cursed with fevers or similar plagues owing to climatic changes. In any event, Ixtual and I unearthed this record.”

He pulled the dirty slip of paper from his pocket and read:

“By decree of the Highest God Icopan, communicated through His High Priest and Mouthpiece’—and so forth and so forth in the Mol—Ummh! and so forth and so forth.” He mumbled hurriedly a long string of titles and dates. “‘And for the guidance of those who have not hitherto heard, the Place of Sacrifice is on this date abandoned and its priests and dwellers retired past the Mountains of the Mines—to the Sacred City, carrying with them to the Temple of Treasure all of value hitherto herein. To those who know not the way but would communicate with any who here dwelt; to those barbaric seekers after truth who would find the true and only gods of our people and would journey thither; six days’ journey to the westward must ye go upon the highway, and three days to the northward, where ye shall find the sacred twin peaks to which the sun is tied, and beneath it those who guard the way.”

He stopped reading, refolded the note and replaced it in his pocket, with the air of one who had given explicit information.

“Well, it seems as if there was some other place to go,” said Wardy, “and as if there was some place where one might find treasure. But there’s nothing particularly sporting about it. It doesn’t say whether there was any big game, or shooting of any sort, and——”

“Listen to him! Listen to him!” screamed the doctor in exasperation. “Shooting! He talks of shooting when I have discovered the solution of the great historical mystery of ages!”

“But,” said I in what I hoped was a conciliatory tone, “your information is, you must grant, a trifle indefinite. There are a thousand twin peaks in this country. The great highway, in a country where vegetation grows by inches per night, would have been obliterated by the jungle a thousand years ago. All that we know is that over it one traveled so many days to the westward and so many to the north.”

“But there must be some peaks that are different from others,” the doctor protested.

“Then suppose you tell us where they are,” I demanded dryly, foreseeing a hopeless task.

“Very well. I will,” angrily retorted the doctor, and fell to pacing backward and forward through the room, cracking his finger joints and muttering to himself.

“The señor’s hat!” said a voice from the doorway in Spanish, and Ixtual had reappeared.

“Ixtual,” questioned the doctor peremptorily, “where are the sacred twin peaks of your people?”

The Indian started as if he had been aroused from sleep. He stared from the doctor to us and then back at the savant as if troubled by this abrupt demand for information. For the only time in our acquaintance that I ever knew him to do so, he stammered, hesitated, and appeared undecided. The doctor said something to him in the Maya tongue that had the effect of relieving him; for he slowly and patiently made a long reply. For a long time they talked. Now and then the doctor referred to us, I am confident, for his gestures indicated that he was speaking of us, perhaps arguing in our behalf. He evidently refused some offer of Ixtual’s, and then asked a question. The Indian did not immediately reply but turned and almost rudely stared at me for a long time, then shifted his scrutiny to Wardy as if pondering over some terrible problem which he must decide. The doctor again spoke what I inferred was a plea—quite as if overcoming some objection made by his strange henchman, and the latter somewhat reluctantly gave way.

“May I tell them?” the doctor asked, reverting to that Spanish which was common to Ixtual as well as ourselves.

“If the great reader of mysteries vouches for them as for himself,” Ixtual declared.

“He says there is a legend among his people that in a spur of the Sierra Chuchumatlane mountains are two peaks beyond which no living man has ever looked and that they were sacred to those who built the temples here,” the doctor answered concisely enough, and still speaking in Spanish as if to make certain that Ixtual might understand. But the latter was not satisfied.

“Señores,” he said gravely, “those peaks are sacred to my people and were once a part of their religion. A man does not betray his religion, does he?”

“But I saw you kneeling in the Catholic church!” Wardy exclaimed, and for a moment the Indian looked troubled.

“There may be other gods than mine, and in which some of my people who work for the white man believe,” was his unanswerable argument. “For the sake of those, I do propitiate them. Listen! I do not know that beyond the great peaks are either mounds or ruins. I know that they are guarded by jungles more terrible than you have ever seen and through which my people believe that none may pass lest he incur the anger of our ancient gods. Not within the knowledge of man has any one ever gone through them. Men of your race who cared for nothing but gold tried and——” He shrugged his shoulders and added: “Died! In later years my people have killed those who made the attempt.”

He paused as if to let this sink in, stared out through the open door at the languid palms as if still undecided, and then turned upon us almost fiercely and with harsh resolution manifest in every line of him, from flashing eyes, gesturing hands, and tensed body. With something between vow, threat, and promise, he said:

“But for reasons of my own I will try to take you there. The Great One for whom the Maya has long waited asks it and answers for you.”

He turned toward Doctor Morgano—that besoiled, frowsy, unkempt savant who with long, black, straight and neglected hair stood there eagerly blinking as if he were a Maya god, and with the utmost deference bowed to him. “But this I say,” he declared, confronting Wardy and me, “that if harm comes to my people; that if upon them is turned a horde of those heartless ones who seek for naught but gold; that if the Maya is again overrun by white barbarians who debauch with words our women and with drink our men, then may all my gods give me the means and way to kill you; may my days be prolonged though it be to the life of the oldest man to slay you, and may all the curses of the hereafter rest on your souls when you are dead!” Suddenly all his half-concealed air of hatred was dropped as if exhausted by vehemence, his face softened, his lips twitched, and his hands were thrust out in appeal. “Understand my position, señores,” he said in a totally different tone. “I am Maya. My people have suffered. They have been beaten. Once they ruled, but now they are ruled by those who are not worthy. By those whose skins are white. I ask you not to betray my people through me who am but trying to repay one who saved his life, and who hopes through him to lift his people from bondage. You as men would do this for your own. I beg you help me do it for mine.”

There was something almost pathetic about him as he stood there before us; something dignified as if he were a man ennobled by high purpose; something that commanded respect. Indian that he was—and mark you I am without either sentiment or poesy—I saw in him a brave and worthy advocate for the few and pitiful survivors of a great nation which had flourished when my people were unborn, or mere barbarians.

I think I put my hand out to meet his. I do not remember whether he accepted it; but I do know that I stood in front of him and said: “Ixtual, I give you my word of honor that no harm shall ever come to you or yours through me. No matter what we may learn, I shall never lead any one to where you may guide us. Is that sufficient?”

“That is also my pledge,” said Wardy solemnly.

“It is enough,” said Ixtual. “To-morrow morning we start,” and turned and walked away as if, having once made a decision, it was irrevocable. And neither in this nor anything after did I know him to break his word.

CHAPTER IV.

Somehow all our individual positions were altered when, at sunrise, our party left the rich loamy lowlands of the Montagua River and swung off over a bullock trail toward the west. We had hurriedly packed our belongings, bought pack burros and saddle ponies, hired a muleteer, paid our bills, and now blindly followed Ixtual, our Maya guide. He, the despised—no, not despised, but regarded tolerantly as an inferior—had been lifted to a plane equal if not above ours. He rose in front, a man broad shouldered and graceful, with stiffly held head. That he was in laborer’s garb with a straw mushroom of a hat on his head, and bare feet that swung limply beneath stirrups that he scorned did not detract from his dignity. He was leading us by suffrance and not through either compulsion or tolerance. We were off to the Sacred Peaks in the care of a master guide who had decided to show us the coveted way.

It was a marvelous journey, sometimes through beautifully fertile and, cultivated lands, and again through dense jungles where we were compelled to ride in single file. Sometimes we stopped in a village posada, and other times we slept in the open; but always considering that we had a rather good-sized pack train to look after, we made fair progress. At first, the natives we met were all friendly; but, stage by stage, we could discern an alteration not only in the regard of those we passed but in the people themselves. Friendliness gave way to indifference, then to curious stares, and at last to pronounced disregard followed by black and sometimes threatening looks. I was convinced that we had entered a country which would have been extremely unpleasant, difficult, and, as we advanced, nearly impossible to travel had it not been for the presence of Ixtual.

Moreover, as we got clean away from the lowland tribes, we entered a land where the Maya stock was altogether in evidence. In the lowlands Ixtual had been treated as a workman; but now we began to note that he was accorded a subtle deference as if among his own people he was a man of importance. I cannot say that his demeanor toward us at all altered; save that now he quietly insisted on certain things, such as the places we must make for our next camps, routes we were to take that plainly brought us into wide and tiring detours through bad trails, and once I heard him caution the doctor to betray no knowledge of the Maya tongue if our camp was visited that night.

The five days indicated by the doctor’s glyphs had stretched to twelve on that afternoon when, emerging from a jungle trail, the Maya stopped until we were all huddled together and then pointed impressively toward the north.

“There, señores,” said he in Spanish, “are the Sacred Peaks. It is to those we must make our way, if you still insist.”

Far away, rising dimly against the afternoon sky we saw a chain of mountain tops and, towering above them, two singular peaks that were of such needlelike sharpness as to suggest twin Matterhorns, and of such regularity, as seen from that distance, as to suggest the handiwork of man rather than nature. They were twins! They appeared to have the same height, shape, and regularity. I have seen many twin peaks, so-called, in the course of a wandering life, but never have I seen two such as these. Their tops were white, as if shrouded in dull silver, verging gradually to blue-gray, to pale blue, and then to purple, dense and solid, at their base.

“By George!” exclaimed Wardy, “they’re wonderful. Worth coming to see, all right, if there isn’t anything to shoot.”

Benny said something in Arabic that I fancy was to suggest that these peaks reminded him of others they had seen, for Wardrop nodded and said: “But not so fine as these.” And then turning to me: “What do you think of them?”

“If the trails aren’t too bad, we should be there by day after to-morrow night,” I said.

“Philistine!” Wardy chuckled. “Aren’t they beautiful?”

“Yes,” I admitted. “But somehow I have never felt that I came here to look at the scenery. I’m seeking something more substantial. If I find what brought me here, I shall have ample time to admire my surroundings. If I don’t, the finest view in the world will look pretty rotten to me!”

I discovered that Ixtual and the doctor had drawn ahead of us to sufficient distance to be out of earshot, and that the Indian was evidently giving impressive, if not emphatic instructions or admonitions to his companion, who listened attentively and frequently nodded his head as if to emphasize that he understood. And now he turned back to us, leaving Ixtual alone, staring at those distant peaks.

“Ixtual says,” the doctor imparted, and then stopped and took off his hat and ran his fingers through his hair as if in considerable perplexity, “Ixtual says that it is necessary for all of you to camp here until—until he and I return.” He blurted the last in desperation as if eager to have it out.

“He says that he must take me to meet some of his people who, as far as I can gather, live about four or five leagues from here—in a sort of village, I think. He says that we can’t go any farther without getting permission from a council, whatever that is.”

“He means the town council—the village burgomasters, or maybe the constabulary,” said Wardrop, taking his monocle out, polishing it carefully, and then staring at the imperturbable Ixtual, who was still gazing, as if in a reverie, at the distant peaks. “Well, mate,” he said, addressing me in English, “what do you think of it? Is it safe to let the doctor go along with this bally chap to some place where maybe they’ll do things to him?”

“I don’t see what else we can do,” I replied thoughtfully. “That is, if Doctor Morgano is willing to accept the risks. In a way, we are rather at the mercy of this Indian; but he seems to be fond of the doctor, so I don’t suppose means him any harm. What do you think?”

Wardrop for a long time appeared to be considering the situation. Now he shifted his eyes from the savant to the imperturbable Ixtual, then back to me, then to Benny, and at last said: “It looks to me as if it were for Morgano to decide, rather than us. Doctor, how do you feel about it?”

“Just the same as when I was beginning to be seasick,” said the doctor. “But I can’t reason him out of it. He says it’s necessary to get their consent. He assures me that all I have to do is to tell the men we have to meet that all I wish is to decipher the lost history of the Mayas. He says he will be personally responsible that no harm will come to me.”

“Humph! Jolly lot of good his personal guarantee would be if they took you to some place and skinned, hanged, and then fried and ate you!” growled Wardrop.

“If you think they would do that, perhaps I had better not go,” said the doctor; and I rather agreed with him that this might prove unpleasant.

Ixtual interrupted us.

“Come, brother,” he said to the doctor. “We have far to travel. It grows late. You can not pass to those peaks without doing as I say. Perhaps not then. If it is still your wish to continue the quest——”

“It is still my wish!” interrupted the doctor with quick emphasis. “I must learn what the secret of the lost——”

“Then,” suavely interjected Ixtual, “it is time we started.”

The doctor suddenly came to a decision.

“I’m going,” he said. “I can’t let an opportunity like this pass by. I trust Ixtual.”

But just the same, I noted that he spoke in French, which this adopted brother of his couldn’t understand. Then he turned and said something in the Maya, and Ixtual gravely listened, then addressed us in Spanish.

“No harm shall come to my brother,” he said quietly. “Of that I give you my word, which is never broken. You are to remain here until we return, if it be a week.” And with that he remounted his horse, the doctor crawled painfully into his saddle, and they rode away, leaving us to pitch camp.

That night we speculated rather aimlessly and anxiously as to what had befallen our companion, and finally went to sleep. The next day we passed much time in watching for Ixtual’s and the doctor’s return. But they didn’t come. The next day Wardy took Benny and turned into the jungle in the hope of finding something to shoot. He got a small deer, which helped out the larder. I fished, and got nothing, although I had excitement enough at one time with a devilishly aggressive snake that I killed and whose diamond-shaped head warned me that it was a deadly type. That evening we began to be apprehensive lest the doctor be in trouble, and sat up late. Finally we turned into our hammocks, and Wardy snored exasperatingly; but I couldn’t sleep. I was just turning over to stretch my limbs when I heard a noise, and sat up, reaching for my rifle, which I had hung on hooks under the hammock shrouds. Then I piled out and kicked the camp fire into a blaze, having recognized the voices of the doctor and Ixtual as they approached. Wardrop rolled out, as did Benny and the muleteer, just as the missing members of our party dismounted and came stiffly toward the fire.

The doctor’s face, habitually skinny and cavernous, looked inordinately drawn and tired.

“Brandy! For the love of the Virgin, give me a drink of brandy!” he exclaimed to me in French. “I’ve been through a purgatory! They’ve made me take oaths! Compelled me to swear by all sorts of awful, horrible things, that I seek nothing other than the decoding of their lost history. I have been frightened—terribly frightened. I have been tempted to renounce all desire to continue my research. Nothing save the fact that I alone might ever reach the secrets of the lost civilization could have induced me to do what I have done. I am now a member of their accursed tribe, renouncing all other allegiance! Brandy—give me——”

And I believe he was on the verge of swooning when I poured him a drink which he gulped, raw and hot, as if it were water. As he lifted his arm I observed that he gave a sudden twitch as if in pain; but I did not learn until later that upon his breast above the heart and extending diagonally upward over the muscles of his right arm and shoulder were sacrificial wounds into which had been rubbed red and purple pigments that were to brand him until death and dissolution. We never knew what he experienced in that initiation into the Maya tribe. Sometimes Wardrop and I speculate vainly as to what took place. We never knew from his lips; but this we do know, that there are martyrs in science as well as in religion; that it is possible for a man to become so immersed in the great quest for knowledge that he will sacrifice even his body, or his life, to gain the knowledge which he seeks. I am certain that Doctor Morgano was one of these.

The situation wasn’t altogether unimpressive. I sometimes think of it. I see again the edge of the jungle, the vivid stars overhead, the agitation of rank verdure moved by a gentle breeze, the lift of torn flame from the fire, the shadowy background in which squatted Beni Hassan Azdul and the stolid muleteer, and near me, Wardrop, huge and intent, as he looked from one to another. And then I see myself staring at the doctor and Ixtual as they two munched, like men famished, the food I had put before them. But I do not remember spoken words. As far as I can recall the conversation was almost trivial, confined to polite inquiries, recountals of how we in camp had passed the time, and finally, of Ixtual’s admonitions that we must get to rest and fail not to be on our way at dawn.

Thinking it over, I seem now to understand that he was apprehensive lest some decree of his tribe be revoked, and we be prevented from farther advance. Somehow I conjecture that all he passed through in our behalf was not precisely beer and skittles for him; that he had given pledges that might terrify the souls of less steadfast men. But I do know that he was desperately intent on our early departure; for it was still dark with the blackness preceding the dawn when he aroused us, and curtly insisted that we must lose not an instant’s time in preparing for the march forward toward the Sacred Peaks.

CHAPTER V.

We passed over trails where the tired animals stumbled, and once we aroused a chorus of dog protests as if we had disturbed a village. Ixtual seemed ever anxious that we hasten our pace, and sometimes was impatient because we made no faster progress; but when the dawn burst and broke with the speed it always has in those latitudes, the Maya seemed relieved that we had come to the borders of what appeared to be a virgin jungle. He sought a place that permitted us to enter it, found it, and led us through what was nothing more than a narrow path into its depths, where we rested. Looking back as if through the egress of a tunnel, I saw plantations below me, the occasional thatched roof of a nipa hut, the stretch of a gentle declivity up which we had climbed in the darkness, and, far away to the right, the morning light on something that looked like a temple in the heart of greenery. It was very distant, almost obscure, tantalizing in its want of detail. Yet somehow I surmised when Doctor Morgano stared at it for a moment with distended eyes that for him it carried trying recollections. He shivered, then turned away toward the jungle as if eager to forget that distant edifice and all that it meant to him. We paused merely long enough to make cocoa and eat some biscuit, and then Ixtual insisted upon our resumption of toil; for it was that and nothing less. Toil of a most distressing character.

For some hours we made our way in half darkness through tunnels of fern and vegetation, over what seemed to have once been a road but was now nothing better than a game path. Creepers festooned across our way until cut; fallen trees necessitated detours; sometimes the trail diverged into a dozen paths, and we waited while Ixtual examined each one. And then when it was nearly noon and the sun beating upon the jungle roof with hammers of white rays we emerged into what had sometime, I opine, been a clearing, and waded through pampas grass higher than our heads although we were mounted, and came to the ruins of a house.

“We are safe now,” grunted Ixtual as if vastly relieved because he had found the way to this spot. “Here we will rest until to-morrow.”

And if I can speak for the others of the party, I think no one at all was inclined to object. I know I didn’t; for after we had killed a few snakes, and thrown out a section of fallen roof from the once-on-a-time house, we had a real meal, and fell into our hammocks exhausted. We needed the rest. And I was even sorry for the poor lathered burros and ponies that drank so feverishly of the water we gave them, and plunged their noses so ravenously into the food we heaped before them.

We felt like new men the next morning when it was time to start. It was but little beyond sunrise, and yet Ixtual had been long awake and exploring the sole path from the central clearing.

“This is the way,” he said to us, when the last ax had been slid beneath harness, and the last pot tied on the pack. “We cannot travel so far to-day. It will be hard work.”

He spoke plain truth if ever a man did. I vouch for that. I have learned what hard work is. All day long we struggled and fought, twisted and curved, through a jungle that seemed ever to grow more obdurate and dense. We labored with machetes now and then, slashing and cutting at tangles of vines as if they were living enemies. Sometimes we fairly bored our way through the vegetable enemy by sheer weight and driving power. Sometimes, exhausted, we sat dripping in sullen silence, finding momentary solace in pipe or cigarette, only to resume that heartbreaking toil of trying to force our way through an interminable and malevolent jungle. Ixtual was conducting us now through the aid of a compass alone.

“We are too far to the left.” Or, “we must bear to the right, señores,” he said, and yet I cheerfully admit that the soul of the man was ever brave and determined. And that night when we found a tiny open spot and made camp he said, as if satisfied: “This is far beyond any place that any man within our time has ever reached. If we can keep on long enough, we shall pass the jungle that holds, and fights, and keeps all men away, and beyond it find places where travel is easier; where no man for hundreds of years has passed. It is well!”

I am certain we liked him for that. It at least gave us something to hope for. It was fortunate for his reputation as a prognosticator that he didn’t venture on how long we were to continue such heartbreaking and muscle-aching effort. Otherwise, I doubt not, we should have given it up as a hopeless task. We thought we might get through within a day or two. Had we known that we were to work this hard for sixteen days, we might have quit in despair! A recountal of physical agonies endured through sweltering heat, stinking fermentation of dead vegetation, innumerable pests of insects, and the constant danger of small deadly vipers and more noble constrictors of the boa tribe, that occasionally sought to embrace one of us or a mule, the insane chattering of monkeys, parrots, and a million other nerve-racking birds, would be useless; but this I assert, that on the day when the jungle thinned and we again saw daylight above us, we were a party of hollowed-eyed, unshaven, unkempt madmen. Men so exhausted they could not speak; men who were ready to murder over imagined insults; men who cared not whether they lived or died, so long as they might find rest! And then, when it seemed that even the fatalistic Oriental stoicism of Benny must break under the strain, and when that giant Wardrop, never complaining, never relinquishing, but ever doggedly beating his way forward came to the final end of strength, we broke through.

We came to an open spot, cut through a thin tangle of creeper, came to a wider open glade, found a way around an upjutting clump of forest, found a narrow water course, another tangle of less stalwart vine, creeper, and tree, and then forged suddenly out upon bare and ascending rock. The half-dead pack animals, urged on by blows and thrusts and prods that in less strained times would have been unthought of, staggered on behind us as we human beings, driven by will power alone, mounted those slopes. Together, men and animals, we threw ourselves upon the sparse grass. Together we looked downward over that barrier of green that we had cleft, traversed, and conquered. It lay behind us, malignant, sullen, brooding, and motionless, bathed by a sympathetic and helpless sun.

To our left a narrow strip of bushes and shrubs seemed laid like a belt up the mountain side, and conjecturing that there we might find water, we turned laboredly toward it. A beautiful stream of water, clear and cold, proved that but a little farther it gushed from the earth; otherwise it would have been heated by the sun’s rays. We decided to follow the stream upward to the spring. We climbed the hillside that was now becoming constantly steeper, and stopped with exclamations of surprise. The spring was in a barren spot of rock and was conducted to an elaborately carved and wrought basin through a pipe shaped like an enormous snake from whose huge, distended mouth the water gushed in a four-inch stream. For more than forty feet that curiously carved serpent lay stretched in graceful curves, a solid piece cut from the solid rock beneath, and this rock itself bore a long series of inscriptions. Instantly Doctor Morgano forgot his fatigue and literally threw himself upon these records, digging away the patches of lichen and moss with his fingers for all the world like a man gone suddenly mad.

“We may as well camp here, it strikes me,” said Wardrop with a significant look at the savant.

“There’s not the slightest use in trying to drag him away until he has deciphered the whole caboodle,” I agreed, and spoke to Ixtual, who assented to our making camp.

I observed, however, that he placed it in such a position that by night no flame of fire nor reflection therefrom might be visible to those who dwelt beyond the jungle. I spoke to him of this fact and he replied: “None but the chiefs of my people know that any man has come this way. The people might be angry if they knew. It is not wise to enrage a people.”

“But why shouldn’t your people be glad to learn all that can be learned of their history?” I asked curiously.

“My people,” he said with great aloofness, “believe these peaks guard something sacred, and that until a sign is given them by the Great Priest who passed countless of hundreds of years ago, no one may come here to disturb the rest of the gods, who do but slumber.”

“But haven’t they been asleep a long time?” dryly asked Wardy, who had been listening.

“What is a sleep of a thousand or five thousand years to those whose lives are eternal?” Ixtual demanded scornfully, and then to put an end to a conversation that to him was becoming distasteful, turned and walked away to where the doctor was still pawing the inscriptions. Wardrop and I were contented to rest, but Benny decided to take a hand, and when I fell asleep in the shade of a tent fly, mentally thanking Heaven that at last we had reached an altitude where mosquitoes and gnats were not so pestiferous, he was patiently gouging away here and there, with the doctor occasionally cautioning him to be careful.

I was awakened by a gunshot, and found that it was nearly dusk. Wardy, who had disappeared, returned after a while with three very palatable game birds that he declared were of the grouse variety, and a wild guinea fowl. Also, he was happier than he had been at any time since we started. He carefully looked over his rifles by the firelight after our evening meal was finished and I chaffed him about it.

“That’s all right,” he said, puffing away at his pipe, and looking up at me through his monocle that in the reflection looked as if he had a mirror patched over one eye. “I have my reasons!”

“Seen any big game? Got wind of any pumas or black jaguars yet?” I asked banteringly; but he merely grunted in a self-satisfied way and continued his everlasting rubbing and oiling. The doctor was working away at some cabalistic work of his own, lying flat on his belly and painfully writing in a huge notebook with a fountain pen. Benny and Juan, the stolid muleteer from the lowlands, were gambling with some card game they alone understood and I think the astute Benny was steadily winning as usual, and Ixtual sat hunched up and dreaming, with wide-open eyes in the fire. I wondered what he saw there. I was the first to turn in, and was not disturbed when the others retired from their diversions. A good night’s rest was all I now required to make me fit again.

I was dreaming of a girl I met one time in Bombay when my dream was suddenly ended by a terrific, blood-stirring scream. Instantly afterward there was the deafening report of a rifle fired not more than a foot or two above my head, then another animal scream and the furious sounds of something rolling, snarling and clawing the grass and rocks, together with the panic-stricken snorts of the pack mules and ponies as they tried to break loose from the raw-hide reatas with which they had been fastened to convenient rocks.

“A light, Benny, you scoundrel! Where’s my other electric torch? I’ve just smashed this one. For the love of Allah, thou ivory-headed one, a light!” Wardrop’s voice was roaring, and Benny soon flashed an electric torch.

“This way—this way, fool!” Wardy again yelled, and I knew that he had gone in the direction of the animal snarls. Juan was now in the midst of the rodeo pacifying his animals, and Ixtual was heaping the kindling prepared for the morning’s fire on a heap of embers he had hastily kicked together. The blaze climbed higher. There was another shot, and stillness. I ran over to where the giant Englishman was now dancing around in ecstasy.

“Look at him—look at the beauty! I’ve got one at last. The trip has paid for itself as far as I’m concerned!” he shouted.

And in the light from the electric torch and fire I saw, stretched out and still, the first jaguar I had ever seen, and the finest I was ever to see, a magnificent cat whose glossy, sheeny fur was as black and glistening as the coat of Erebus. My old hunter instinct awoke, and for the moment I envied Wardrop.

“You lucky beggar!” I exclaimed.

“That’s what made me get ready,” chortled Wardy. “I saw spoor this afternoon. Laugh when I clean up my rifles next time, will you? It’s lucky!”

And then we were given another fine treatment for a good night’s rest.

“By the mother of riddles!” cried the doctor, who after a single glance at the rare jaguar had strolled indifferently away toward the camp fire, “I’ve got it!”

“Now what on earth do you suppose he’s got?” I asked Wardy, who could not tear himself from his kill.

“Oh, probably the colic. Whatever it is, it’s not so important as this.”

“I’ve got the key to the left-hand inscription,” roared Doctor Morgano. “The one I was puzzled by this afternoon. It’s inspiration—that’s what it is. I’m a genius. It’s a combination of the glyphs of the first and second cycles, and perhaps antedates either. It is a most marvelous discovery! Prodigiously valuable. It opens a new record, it does!”

“By Gad!” said I to the muleteer, who was the only one in that camp who seemed sane. “If you and I aren’t turned loose in a wilderness with a lot of maniacs on a vacation!”

CHAPTER VI.

Wardy was so intent on the preservation of his black jaguar pelt, so rapturous over it as a trophy, so boastful because he claimed to be one of a bare half dozen living men who had shot one, that he was unapproachable. He and Benny were so smeared with their slaughterhouse work as they painstakingly picked and scraped and tore away minute pieces of fat from the inside of that unfortunate beast’s hide, that one might have thought the fate of generations of sportsmen to come hinged upon their doing this job thoroughly. Wardrop rhapsodized like a poet.

The doctor and Ixtual and Juan all clawed moss and lichen. I knew we couldn’t advance until the work was done, so, being the only practical man in the party, borrowed Wardrop’s shotgun and started out to get a few wild birds for the pot. I had heard in the dawn the screaming see-saw-see-saw whank of wild guinea fowl farther up the mountain’s side. I’d have given my watch for a good hunting dog just then, but within half an hour had three wild guinea hens, and one of those booming grouse that lived in that isolated place. After that I had rather bad luck and slow work for an hour or two and had by this time got pretty well up the mountain side. I had gone higher than I intended and was thinking of turning back a few yards farther, and then I made a discovery.

There was a shelf as if the land had slipped some time in past ages, and there, broken off at its very edge and in naked rock where not even the sparse grass of the higher altitudes grew, was a well-cut road. Not a mere path, but a road cut through living rock like those old Roman roads built by the Mediterranean conquerors when they moved northward. A road with gutters for freshet waters at its sides, and as well engineered as could be done by any man of this day. Here and there the sparse vegetation of the high altitude had found lodgement in a crevice; occasionally rubble stones from the sides had slipped across, and a few huge bowlders that had rolled from higher points had found lodgment. But the great highway was there, clear, passable, unbroken through all the lost ages, so well had those ancients built. Forgetful of game, I traversed it for nearly a mile as it wound like a modern switch-back to and fro by easy gradients on the steep mountain side.

And then I consulted my watch, saw that it was nearly noon, surmised that my companions below might begin to worry over my absence, and somewhat reluctantly retraced my steps. I arrived to find the camp half packed, and some anxiety or annoyance visible because of my nonappearance. But they all welcomed the game and speedily luncheon was being prepared.

The doctor was again off by himself with his notebook, and working like a madman over his interminable puzzles. He ate of those most palatable and delicious fried birds as if they were merely tinned tripe. The others of us, I record, gnawed the last tender morsels from the bones and wished for more. But I, in the meantime, had not divulged my discovery. I thought I was entitled to some archæological credit myself.

“The stone reads,” said the doctor, at last, “as follows: ‘This spring was opened and this basin built by the keepers of the Sacred Portals, Quantex and Totlipan, in their hours of idleness. It was begun in the latter part of the eighth cycle and completed in the beginning of the ninth to the glorification of the god Icopan, to whom it is humbly dedicated. The Great Road by which it is situated, leading up to the Sacred Portals of the Outer gate, was then narrow but has since been widened by the zealous labors of those who believe that it is fitting that the way should be made easy for those who visit the Sacred Temple City of the God of all Gods.’”

The doctor paused, looked up at us, and said, almost shame-facedly: “The inscriptions on the right-hand side I am not quite clear about. I require other links in this lost history. Those records seemingly chronicle the journeys of various persons of importance who passed this way. There is but one of them that is highly interesting, and that records that on a certain day there passed along this so-called sacred highway those who had fled from or abandoned Quirigua. Thus it ends. Now the next step for us is to direct our efforts to the discovery of that road.”

It was my turn.

“While you have been wasting your time in immaterial points here,” I said, “I have taken pains to search for and find that road. I knew we should need it,” I said loftily. “I will guide you to it whenever you are ready.”

By one o’clock we were on the old road,, and I think that all of us, men as well as beasts were grateful for the change. It was vastly different from burrowing our way through a jungle. It was, indeed, a highway. What it must have been in those past ages when it was carefully maintained and cleaned, we could readily conjecture. Higher and higher it led us by long angles, sometimes gently ascending and other times unavoidably abrupt, until in the very shadows of the peaks we could see it winding white and clean back to its beginning.

Ahead of us was a black and lofty opening into the very heart of the hills. On either side of it were watch towers cut from the rock itself, curiously ornate, profusely decorated with Maya art, and imposing even to us who had seen modern works attesting man’s ingenuity and fancy. Almost reverently we advanced until we came within the shadows of the opening. I was struck by the profound stillness of the late afternoon; the same feeling that one sustains on the summit of some lofty peak far beyond other voices, the murmur of humanity, or the rustling of growth and vegetation. It was as if we stood in the portals of a dead world.

“We must investigate these sentinel houses,” said the doctor, and with Ixtual at his heels turned toward the nearest. It was overhung by the cliffs above, which protected it—hollowed out like those temples and habitations of long-dead cave dwellers in the cañons of the Colorado, and not unlike them, save that here were evidences of a higher state of civilization.

In silence all of us followed the archæologist and his Maya companion, peering over their shoulders as they advanced. The doctor paused just inside the door, bent forward, and then in a hushed voice said: “Peace to the sentinel! He died at his post.”

We saw the crumbling remnants of a man’s skeleton, persisting with that singular obstinacy of human relics in mute attestation to the fact that once here had lived and died a man. By its side lay something that still preserved its shape in that dead and motionless atmosphere, a shape that had been a spear shaft and at its end gleamed dully a spear head that we examined. It was of hardened copper; hardened by that lost art of the ancients; so hard that I could not so much as mar it with the file in my pocketknife. What was left of the skull was adorned with a head-band of similar metal but bearing curious marks like the insignia of a modern regiment. We learned afterward that this was the emblem worn only by the. Guard of the Gate.

We found inside this artificially made cave house several rooms. One of them was evidently the dining room, or mess, for on a stone table there stood plates of copper, ancient jugs betokening the development of Maya ceramics, and tiny heaps of dust which I think must have been some time food. Beds were there, with their garnishings mere heaps of dust and dry mold. In one room on a stone table we found round pieces of carefully cut bronze that I think must have been coins from an ancient purse.

But of the cause of death, or the story of that last sentinel’s end, there was no trace. It was as if he, the last of the watch, had died across the portals of his lookout when some dread plague had stricken the land.

The sentinel house on the other side of the roadway was bare. Evidently something had happened in the end that made it difficult, or unnecessary, to maintain a double watch, and its belongings had been removed to the opposite side by the last of the guardians. The doctor believed from the glyphs above the doors that on one side had dwelt those who guarded by day, and on the others those who watched by night; but aside from the ceramics and smaller relics, he found but little to arouse his enthusiasm. Wardrop and I thought we should bury the bones of the last sentinel; but the doctor insisted that they should be left until he could collect them and transport them to some museum. He could not be dragged away until he had made measurements of the skull, constantly bemoaning the need of an expert osteologist who could have pointed out to us the difference between the poor bones of this dead soldier and those of a modern man.

“It doesn’t seem quite fair to the poor bloke’s remains,” said Wardy to me, outside the place. “As far as I can guess, he stuck it like a Briton and so he shouldn’t be mauled about after his job was done.”

“I agree with you,” I said, and we went out to where Juan was draped over the withers of a mule, patiently and unexcitedly waiting for orders.

When the doctor and Ixtual returned to us, we held a consultation and decided it might be wise to investigate before proceeding with the outfit. Accordingly we advanced into the great cavern but came to a halt before we had gone more than twenty paces. Above us was a half-lowered gate of great bronze bars, ornate in design.

“I think we’d better prop the thing up somehow before passing it,” said Wardrop, eying its prodigious height and estimating its great weight. “If the thing was to jar loose and fall after we had passed through, it might—might be awkward.”

His caution was heeded even by Ixtual, although Doctor Morgano raged, passed beneath the barrier, out again, and besought us to continue our exploration. He was overruled, and we decided to camp that night in the empty guard house to the right and devote some time to blocking up the gate. It was well that we did; for when, on the following day, we had piled rocks in the slots to the height of a man’s reach the prodigious weight was unaccountably released and slid downward as if endowed with a malevolent wish of its own to cut us off from what lay behind.

“You see?” Wardy called to the doctor. “That mass of metal has been sometime suspended by ropes or cables, and they had rotted away and if we hadn’t taken the precaution to stuff up those slots with rock, some of us would have been shut off behind there for the Lord knows how long.”

But the doctor didn’t answer, being at that moment more interested in solving the mystery of the mechanical appliances by which the great gate had originally been raised or lowered. Indeed, had we not pointed out to him that this was a puzzle that could be unraveled when we had more provisions on hand and more time, I think he would have delayed all further progress.

We advanced into that enormous and overwhelming darkness as if entering some vast, high-vaulted, unlighted cathedral in the middle of the night and had not gone more than a hundred yards before we came upon a set of gates and outposts similar to those at the entrance, save that these had been fastened up by great bronze pins, as if the outer sentries, finding their numbers diminished, had taken this precaution before it was too late. Here, too, were guard houses on either side of men who dwelt in artificial light during their time of duty. These houses had other ceramics, and signs of habitation in those long-past days, but we found no skeleton remains of the post. There were racks of spears, javelins, and arrow heads, as if this had been an armory. There were glyphs on the walls that the doctor deciphered and then walked out to investigate.

“Above us,” he said, pointing his electric torch, “are tons and tons of balanced bowlders that could be released by following the directions embossed in those stone tablets. You see all they had to do was, when things became desperate, to seize the stone levers referred to and which I think must be behind the second gates, and there would fall upon an enemy standing where we now stand, hundreds of tons of stone. Enough possibly to fill this entire cavern. Maybe it would run into thousands of tons. That we can learn only by investigation.”

“It’s a long tunnel all right,” Wardy had just said to me, when we had walked at least two miles.

“It is that,” I agreed, holding the white flaring carbide reflector lower to see if any impediment lay at our feet. And it was well that I did so, for there, scarcely ten yards ahead of us, lay the black edge of a gulf.

Cautiously we advanced to its verge and threw the light downward. Powerful as was that reflector and its acetylene blaze, it fell upon nothing save the void.

“Here’s a pebble,” said Wardy in an awestruck voice. “Listen, everybody, and see if you can hear it strike.”

He pitched the chunk of rock forward. It vanished into the gloom. We listened for a long time. There came no audible sound. We drew back and stared at each other in the ghastly white light. It was as if we had stood on the verge of a bottomless pit.

“There must be some way around this place,” said Ixtual. “Surely there was some way of crossing or avoiding it.”

“There,” said I, throwing the light forward at my feet, “is the answer,” and pointed at what in some ancient time had been seats for girders hewn into the solid rock. Lifting the reflector upward into the gloom we saw the remnants of what at some time had been a roof support to fortify a suspended span. The other side of the chasm could not be discerned. It was as if we had come to the final and hopeless end of the road.

It is impossible to tell of all the expedients we tried to light that cavern sufficiently to expose the opposite side in the hours that followed. We went outside and collected from the lower-lying jungle mule-loads of fagots that we piled and made from them a huge bonfire. We used carbide flares, and electric torches, and everything we could call to resource to augment the light; but it was useless; for beyond us still lay that wall of impenetrable darkness. We searched for secret side passages and found none, and then when about despairing, held another consultation.

“There must have been some other road,” insisted Ixtual. “Surely they must have had an emergency way so that if by accident the bridge was destroyed they could rebuild it. How was it ever built in the first instance?”

That set us to effort again. This time we decided to fasten together all reatas of rawhide, all pack ropes, and lower a man into the depths as far as we could. I insisted that this risk must be mine. Wardrop with equal insistence said he believed he should be the one to go, at which we all laughed derisively, for his weight would have required the use of much stronger ropes than the make-shift lot on which whoever descended must trust his life. I finally had my way and we rigged a bosun’s chair into which I seated myself and was swung out over that somewhat terrifying blackness, and lowered away. The edge proved to be a projecting shelf, so that I swung clear of the wall. There were several anxious questions I asked myself as the depth increased, among which was whether the lines by which I was suspended were anywhere weak, whether the knots might hold, and also whether the air into which I was dropping might not be foul. To my considerable satisfaction I discovered that the air remained as pure as above, and there was no sign of the ropes yielding or parting; but the light from my electric torch showed nothing in the wall in the way of steps or break. It was as nature had left it, smooth and unbroken. When at last a shout from above told me that our entire line was paid out, I cast the light downward. Blackness alone was still below me. I took from my pocket a chunk of rock which I had brought with me and dropped it. I thought it would never strike, and so far away was it that when it did the sound was barely audible. For an instant I had a sickening feeling of giddiness brought on by imagining what my fate would be if I tumbled after that stone.

“All right! Hoist away!” I shouted, and was slowly drawn upward.

In my slow and laborious ascent I swung the torch to and fro sidewise, and suddenly observed something that had escaped my attention before, something away over to the side that appeared to be either a deeper shadow or a break.

“Hold fast a moment!” I called, and strove to discern more clearly whether I had been mistaken; but there was no doubt of it, that fully thirty yards to my left there was a deeper shadow. Whether it was cast by an out jutting stratum of rock or was a hole, I could not decide. I tried to estimate the distance, and shouted to my companions above to measure by making a mark on the line as they brought me upward, the depth at which I then hung.

When they brought me up over the top I was amazed at a strange silence and relief that fell over them. Wardrop suddenly caught my hand and clutched it tightly. The doctor patted me on the back nervously, and Ixtual looked at me gravely.

“What’s the matter?” I demanded.

For answer Benny picked up the improvised line behind and held up to the light of his torch a section of pack rope. It had parted until but a single strand remained.

My knees abruptly and uncontrollably trembled and weakened, for now I realized that for a time I had hung suspended above that awful black abyss by a strand of hemp not much thicker than my little finger.

CHAPTER VII.

Fortunately for our further exploration, there were rawhide reatas sufficiently long to reach the fifty-foot depth at which I had been suspended when attracted by the black spot, or shadow. And it was as much to conquer my own cowardly fears as to continue the work that I insisted upon being the one to make the second descent. But I will admit this—that I am no hero. I’ll admit that, remembering the narrowness of my previous escape, I was afraid when it came time to descend once more. I’m rather proud of the fact that I compelled myself to the test.

“You said about thirty yards to the left of where you were,” commented Wardy, “Well, I’ve measured that distance off along the edge of this cursed hole, and find that it brings us squarely up against the wall on that side. That is, so far as the roadway goes. It looks to me as if the cavern, however, is circular beyond that edge. It’s impossible to see around a big corner there.”

And his surmise proved correct, for again I found myself being lowered from a shelf and the cavern extended to an indefinite distance to my left after a single wall was passed; but this time I noted that I was so close to a wall on the left hand that I could reach out and touch it. I began to fear that this wall had thrown the shadow I had seen and that it would prove nothing after all. I tried to estimate the distance of my descent as I was lowered. At fifty feet there was still the unbroken rock; at fifty-five feet there was still nothing different, and then, flashing my light downward, I saw not five feet below my feet a shelf of stone plainly the work of human hands, and a handhold cut in the solid rock. So ingeniously was it arranged that I could almost reach the shelf without stepping from my boatswain’s chair; but in the end I was compelled to do so and stretch a leg far out to make contact with it. A slight shove outward sent me into a pendulum motion, a second shove widened the arc, and I landed on the shelf of rock with ease and steadied myself with the handhold. There was a single moment of trepidation lest the shelf beneath my feet or the handhold give way; but it was a needless terror, for both were as firm as on the day they were hewn by the long-dead hands of their maker. I moored my line, shouted to those above that I had found something, and turned toward the wall behind. There, so cleverly concealed that it might have escaped detection save by sheer accident of shadow and the powerful ray of a modern electric torch, was a passageway.

Cautiously, I turned into it to discover that probably it had originally been a natural one, enlarged later by the handiwork of man until it was possible for me to advance with head erect as through a tunnel in a modern mine. It led upward, and now I was aware that through either natural or artificial passages the air was sweet and cool. For perhaps fifty feet I followed it and then came to two flights of steps cut into the rock. Up one of these I ascended to discover three other openings. I paused to consider my situation. Perhaps I was entering a place honeycombed by those ancient workers. It did not seem wise to invade these many ways with no means of retracing my steps.

I went back out and shouted my information to those anxiously waiting above, my voice coming back in numerous and repeated echoes from that great cavern surrounding us and the abyss beneath.

“What do you suggest?” Wardrop’s voice called.

“That some one come down bringing some spare torch batteries and chalk or something with which to make guiding marks,” I called back.

“Good!” he replied, and then I heard a confused lot of echoes and sounds as if they were discussing something, followed by a shout of encouragement from above and Wardy’s voice, asking: “Do you wish to remain there, or shall we hoist you up?”

“I’ll wait here,” I replied. “But mark this: Whoever comes down had best bring a pole or a piece of rope with him so that he can throw it to me and I can pull him over to this footing.”

“All right. We understand,” was his reply, and I released the boatswain’s chair and saw it disappear upward from sight. I sat down and smoked a cigarette until, remembering the necessity for economizing the battery in my lamp, I extinguished it, threw away what was left of my cigarette, and sat in a stygian and overpowering darkness. Time lengthened until I became impatient and wondered, in all that silence, what could have happened. And then I heard voices above me as if some unusual preparation was being made. It continued at intervals for quite a while and then came Wardy’s voice from above: “All right, down there?”

On my affirmative answer I heard more noises, and a harsh creaking, then in a few moments a shape came within the light from my torch. It was James Dalrymple Wardrop, and the tough rawhide reatas were straining and stretching as if at any moment likely to part under his weight. In his hand he carried a pole that he reached out for me to grasp and I gave a mighty tug and pulled him over to the shelf, wondering it if would bear his weight, then fairly dragged him inside.

“Of all the reckless things I ever knew of a man doing, your trusting yourself to that line is the worst!” I declared with a heat that was merely the reaction from anxiety.

“By Jove, old chappy!” he said, readjusting his monocle. “I thought when I felt that rawhide spring and bound that I was done for. However, here I am!”

“But how on earth did the other three lower you?”

“Oh, we rigged up a sort of windlass,” he said unconcernedly. “You see, I had to come. Rum place down here—what?”

The line had disappeared and now it came down again, this time carrying a wicker pannier from one of the mule’s equipment.

“I thought it might be wise to have some food and water and a lantern, as well as the extra batteries,” Wardy explained, and I snorted in derision. Had I known what was to follow I should not have been so merry.

For a long time we wound round and upward until we came to circular steps that twisted spirally as if climbing up the shaft of a monument. There were hundreds of them, and we began to think these must lead us to the top of one of the peaks. Our legs ached by that continuous and unchangeable motion. We rested at intervals, and then, when about to discuss the advisability of returning, came to a singular feature.

There was an open door with stone bars across it as if to guard something beyond. The bars lifted easily and with great caution I advanced, now using my electric torch. Suddenly I paused and involuntarily drew back a pace and then fell to my knees and crawled forward. I had come to a great void so enormous that my light would not penetrate it.

I crawled cautiously out and looked over its edge. Away off beneath me, appearing small, was something like a flickering star. While I looked it leaped into a great blaze, and to my astonishment I made out figures moving around a fire and replenishing it. Pygmies they looked from that height; but it was certain they were our companions. I shouted loudly to them, and saw them pause and flash their torches hither and yon. Their voices came back with multiplied echoes. I could not distinguish their words, but flashed them signal after signal until they looked upward and waved a response. Wardy took his turn and then we examined our surroundings.

Enormous triangular stone posts with the apexes of the triangles leaning inward from the cavern for a time puzzled us, and then we discovered that the perpendicular sides of these were shielded with bronze and that these betrayed wear. We could not imagine the object of these and so turned back and resumed our search. For a time we passed along a level gallery and then came to another side entrance and another set of those peculiar and massive posts. A third set was reached, and we were at the end of the gallery.

Disappointed, we retraced our steps and descended the tiresome stairs and called up to our comrades above. The voice of Juan answered and explained that he had been, left alone and that the doctor and Ixtual had gone outside to study the guardhouses. We made a lunch from the pannier, smoked, and then took the opening that led to our right. Again we made the toilsome climb and again we found three sets of posts, and the end of the gallery.

“That makes their reason plain,” said Wardy. “They had some sort of a bridge suspended across that hole and held up by cables of some kind that were fastened here.”

“Either that or else there was some sort of mining carried on in this shaft under us and this was a mechanism for hoisting,” I conjectured; but it was useless to waste time in surmise, because we had gained nothing thus far by our discoveries.

It was growing late in the evening and we decided after a short consultation to postpone our further search until the next day. It was not until then that I remembered the risk of my companion’s weight on that rawhide line, and was somewhat troubled thereby.

“I think,” I suggested, “that I had best go up first and personally get together all the spare straps and pack ropes and strengthen that line before you trust your weight on it. What do you think?”

“Strikes me as a most excellent idea,” he said. “I’ve been thinking a bit about that confounded rubber string since we got back here.”

In the light of the lanterns I could see his calm grin; but I am certain he would have run the risk without betraying fear had I not voiced an apprehension for him.

I called up to Juan but got no response. I called again and then Wardy joined his bellowing voice to mine. A sleepy voice answered, recognizable as the doctor’s.

“Well, I’ll be hanged!” muttered Wardy. “That old cuss has been left on watch and has calmly gone to sleep! What do you think of that!”

“What’s the matter?” I called upward.

“Nothing,” the doctor’s voice replied, and we could hear him vent a great yawn. “Ixtual and Juan are tucking the animals in bed in one of the guardhouses to keep them safe from those devilish jaguars. Find anything?”

“Not much,” I replied. “We have done all we can to-day and want to be hoisted up.”

“All right. I’ll lower the line and then call them to help,” said Doctor Morgano; and then a moment later: “I can’t get the blamed contraption to work. The rope just coils around this drum-thing we fixed up. Wait, I’ll tie a big rock on the end of it, then it’ll come down.”

We could indistinctly hear him fumbling around and occasionally yawning like an old hyena, and then his voice, triumphantly: “I’ve got a rock on now that’ll pull that rope tight. Only one I could find, and it weighs about two hundred pounds; but I can roll it over.”

“Stop! Stop!” I cried in alarm; but too late. With a rush of wind that warned me that something had fallen so closely that had I been leaning outward at that moment I must inevitably have been smashed, something fell past me. I clung to the rock handle, momentarily panic-stricken with suspense, and my voice was tremulous and weak as I called: “Morgano! Doctor Morgano! Are you safe?”

“I’m safe enough,” came the reassuring but lugubrious reply from above, “but that infernal rawhide line has broken off where it was fastened and—dear me!—how on earth are we ever to get you up again?”

“The damned old imbecile!” growled Wardy. “Wants to know how we are to get back up again. That’s something I’d rather like to know myself!”

CHAPTER VIII.

If it had not been a situation of considerable consternation, I think we might have laughed at the bawling conversation that followed. Ixtual suggested that by cutting up all saddlery, and leather pack cases, and weaving in with it strips of canvas he could make a line that would bear our weight. But he knew that in the meantime we should be compelled to remain underground, and that meantime would probably be a matter of two or three days. There was nothing else for us to do but agree. Wardy had but one admonition which he bellowed upward:

“Don’t you dare to cut that pelt of mine up to get leather! Do you hear me?”

“It shall be cut last of all, señor,” replied Ixtual calmly. “And we shall work fast and hard.”

Both Wardrop and I were much too seasoned campaigners to grumble over a situation that could not be improved, and so extinguished our lantern to economize oil, ate a cold meal, and went to rest as best we could some distance from the opening into the cavern. The last thing I heard him mutter was to thank Heaven that he had never walked in his sleep.

On the morning following we renewed our exploration, not much the worse physically for a night passed on the somewhat cold and hard stones of our prison. We followed one tunnel that proved tiresome, long, and that came to an abrupt and broken end, as if some contemplated work had been abandoned. We tried another that led us into a series of small chambers whose use we could not even surmise. We took the last one in the afternoon and carefully marked our way on the walls at intervals, as we had done with all the others; but this time we found that it led into a broader passage across which a gallery crossed at right angles which was much broader and more liberal than any we had hitherto encountered.

“This shows that whoever built it had some sense,” declared Wardy, stretching himself. “It’s the first time since I came down that rope that I’ve found a place high enough to stretch my head. I’ve got a double joint in my shoulders and neck that will leave me deformed for life!”

It was the first complaint he had made, but only one who has been compelled to stoop for hours on end can appreciate his physical weariness of posture. Our sense of direction was by this time entirely gone and we had no compass, so we tossed a coin to see which side we should explore.

“Heads to the right; tails to the left!”

Tails won, and we started onward with our spirits by this time in that numbed state when everything one does seems useless; but the broad road continued, for which we were thankful. We trudged soberly along without much conversation. We had passed beyond mere words down there in the darkness while surrounded by perplexities and anxieties. Almost groping, and constantly pausing to inspect the floor beneath or the walls and the roof of this stone highway, we must have been walking for nearly an hour when we came to a halt. Our tunnel appeared to end in a most unexpected manner. It was as if we had stepped into the midst of a chamber devoted to huge, crude, archaic machinery consisting of stone levers, wheels, and weights.

“Well, this beats me,” I admitted, staring about me and bringing out the electric torch which I had so carefully economized for emergencies.

“Looks as if it might be the original power plant for Noah’s ark,” Wardy murmured, staring about him through the monocle that had never been dropped even in the heart of a pitch-black darkness. “What do you suppose it’s all for?”

“That’s what I’m curious to learn,” I answered, trying to work out the amazing puzzle done in stone.

For at least an hour we tried to discover the meaning of this mass of stuff. We sat down and talked it over, smoked, and tackled our project anew. Then we decided to crawl upward into its intricacies to learn if anything were concealed behind. Again our efforts proved useless. It was as if we had come upon an unsolvable mystery there in the heart of the mountain. One peculiarity of the chamber was that here for the first time we found dust, heaps of it, and in climbing in and out we had disturbed this until we looked like a pair of road sweepers. We had no inclination to laugh, but Wardy found time for expletives as he took that precious monocle from his eye for about the hundredth time and polished it on his handkerchief. We were both standing on the floor of the tunnel at the moment, somewhat exhausted by our efforts in crawling through that bewildering maze of cut-stone arms, pillars, and rollers.

“I think we’re wasting time here,” said Wardy. “Suppose we have a smoke and then go back the other way? How does that strike you? It’s getting late again—almost six o’clock,” he added as he consulted his watch. “And—I’m deucedly tired!”

“Right-o,” said I. “Smoke it is, and then back to the grub!”

With a sigh of disappointment Wardy fished a pipe from his pocket, filled it, lighted it, and flashed his lamp around for a final survey. His gaze fell upon a huge stone lever that projected outward into a space hollowed like an alcove. He gave a grunt of satisfaction, said there was a seat big enough to keep a man of his size from squatting on the floor, and, putting both hands upon it, swung himself upward and sat down.

The result was amazing. It was as if he had added his weight to the lever by which Archimedes said he could move the earth. Great stones ground suddenly into place, rollers revolved, and with as harsh a noise as if hundreds of long-disused grindstones had been set in motion the whole mass of crude mechanism moved in bewildering complexity until suddenly the end of the closed tunnel lifted and the first daylight we had seen for hours began streaming in. I shouted loudly. And what did J. Dalrymple Wardrop do? He sat still, calm, voiceless, and phlegmatically watching the course of events as he was slowly lowered to the floor of the tunnel. We heard exclamations of astonishment in Italian, Spanish, and Maya; the sounds of men in flight, then returning to see what cataclysm had disturbed them.

I rushed through the opening to learn that I was in the back of the guard chamber, and had disturbed the doctor, Ixtual, and Juan in the midst of leather braiding and that the sun was still shining bravely and brightly outside. For an instant, as if paralyzed by the unexpected, as if spellbound by a miracle, they stood gaping at me, and then the doctor rushed forward and threw his arms about my neck, and I think that he might with Latin fervor have kissed me had I not repelled him and recalled Wardy.

“This way, this way!” I cried, and rushed back through the opening.

Wardrop was still seated on the beam, the great counterpoise that by mechanical cunning had lifted tons of stone, and was still calmly smoking and patiently waiting.

“By Jove!” he said. “By Jove! Some machine this—what? To think that one man like me could move a mountain with it! Who’d have thought it? But what I’d like to know now is if I’ve got to hold this lever down all night, or if you fellows are going to get a pile of rocks that weigh as much as I do to keep it in place so I can get off my perch. My legs are deucedly cramped, you know, sitting here.”

Forgetful of the joy of deliverance and grateful only that we had found a way to reunion, we fell to blocking open that immense stone door and substituting bowlders on the lever for Wardy’s weight. At last we accomplished all this, and stood outside, sweating and panting, to inspect our work. It was Juan, the muleteer, who discovered the secret.

“See, señores,” he cried, “a single block of stone in the wall of the inner room has receded!”

It was true. So delicately poised and balanced was that enormous mechanism of stone weighing tens of tons, that by merely thrusting inward a stone in the wall of the guard chamber the apparently solid wall of the tunnel opened and lifted upward. So carefully was this concealed that when on the following day we removed the impediments to the fall of the door and lowered it to its place, we could not have told save through previous knowledge where the opening was. I had until then never seen so perfect an example of the stone-cutter’s art.

And on the following day Wardy and I conducted, with an air of great experience and certitude, our companions through the chambers we had visited. The reason for the existence of the secret passage was still a mystery. We could be thankful for two features—our escape and the fact that not all the saddles and cases had been destroyed to provide a new line to lift us from the hollows of the cavern.

“If that chap Ixtual had ever laid a knife against that jaguar skin before we got out,” Wardy confided to me, “I’d have murdered him!”

We now turned to further exploration. It was comparatively easy, particularly as far as our minds were concerned when fortified by the knowledge that we could, in ultimate failure to return to the open air of the free mountain side, retreat. We followed the long vaulted way of the single road that Wardrop and I had not traversed. It led, straight and true and without difficulty for more than a mile, when it abruptly turned a right angle and we were aware by the change of sound and reverberation that we were again confronting an open space. Exercising all caution, we moved through an opening. Our lamps again caught no reflection from walls. Our whispered comments again threw back repeated echoes. We moved slowly outward and paused once more on the edge of a fathomless and yawning abyss.

“We’ve come out to the edge of that devilish hole again!” Wardy said. And indeed it looked as if we had done just that, and been disappointed anew. But then we turned to learn whither the other way led and once more traveled in a great natural chamber quite similar to the outer opening of the caverns which we first found. It narrowed as we advanced, but still it was like a comparatively broad street. Its floors were level and white. The lost vault of the roof came lower and lower until we reached a place where nature had been assisted by man to cleave it away; yet still it was thirty feet above our heads. Remarkable stone niches appeared in the walls as if for the disposal of statues, and in them we found the charred sticks as of ancient braziers, and the ashes of long-dead fires. And then, almost at high noon, we came to the end of that marvelous pathway. Again we were confronted by a ponderous mechanism of stone, which we scanned, inch by inch.

“It’s the same as the one we found at the other end,” shouted Wardy. “Just the same. Find the big lever and—if it busts this mountain open and me with it—I’ll sit on it!”

Again we found the alcove in the rock, the great monolithic beam, the carefully adjusted weights of a counterpoise, and again this sportsman, adventurer, and veteran of many vicissitudes threw himself up until his weight was added to the balance. Again a great stone shield slid slowly upward, and again daylight—the light of high noon—momentarily dazzled our eyes. We rushed forward and looked out upon a strange scene, doubtless beheld again by the eyes of man for the first time in centuries.

We were looking down into a deep valley, saucer-shaped and circular, overgrown with forest and jungle through which there gleamed here and there ruins of what had once been important buildings, giving evidence that at some period this whole area had been densely populated and tilled.

In the center of the depression was a lake and an island, and it was this that held our attention the longest and that afforded the greatest surprise; the astonishing feature of the island being that not only was it devoid of vegetation but that it bore stone edifices of impressive magnificence. In the exact center it rose upward in high, pyramidal shape, and the very apex of this eminence was covered with what appeared to be a vast temple gleaming dull gray in the sunlight. Stretching from the entrance beneath our feet was nothing but jungle growth, but our attention was attracted to what seemed a line broken through this at some three hundred yards to our right, and with slight difficulty we made our way thither, to meet with another surprise.

The great main entrance to the cavern in the mountain opened high and wide above us, and its portals were flanked with guard houses and sentry boxes exactly like those we had discovered on the other side of this great natural bore. The line we had seen through the jungle was a wonderful roadway built with such lavish care and fidelity, and with such excellent engineering that not even the jungle, nor storm, nor age, nor weather had ruined its splendid proportions. It swept away in graceful curves to reduce the gradients and invited us to venture upon its surface.

We turned to explore the guard houses, and therein found splendid and intact specimens of Maya ceramics, including the grotesque effigy vases and pitchers and steins in which they delighted, and also the remains of stands of spears, bronze-headed, the shafts of which crumpled away at our touch; for the white-ant pest was here in evidence. But of more gruesome relics of ancient humanity we found not a trace. It was as if the inner portals of the great tunnel had been abandoned without haste, perhaps because there came a time when it was no longer considered necessary to guard it.

“The reason for the great stone posts in the upper sides of the interior is plain now,” said Doctor Morgano. “They had a suspended bridge there that was broad and strong. The passage through which we passed at the sides was kept secret for emergency use. If an overpowering enemy sought to invade them, they could easily destroy the bridge across the chasm above. That is what probably eventually took place. Either that or, when gradually driven here by the ravages of disease, decimation of population, and slowly approaching death of the nation, they deliberately cut themselves off from communication with the outside world save through the secret passage, of which probably but a very few trusted sentinels ever knew. Once the bridge was destroyed the main highway became useless and was abandoned. Think what it must have been like in the great days of Maya prosperity! Think of the traffic that rumbled through this arch and over that road. See, even yet can be noticed the wheel ruts!”

I’ll admit that, unimaginative as I am, I was awed by the thought of all that these old portals must have witnessed through centuries of peace and prosperity; or vicissitude and war. Through these had come the last remnants of a nation that had at one time dominated a country of magnificent extent and offering unlimited room toward both a northern and a southern continent for its expansion. Who could ever know why they had not spread out? Was it impossible for a nation to grow beyond a certain size and strength before meeting with some disaster, or some cancer of arrogance, or some terrible sloth and impotence that must in time destroy it? I think some such thoughts must have been Wardy’s, for he said, quietly, as if to himself:

“To tell the truth, this saddens me. ’Pon honor, I’m sorry for those poor beggars, whoever they were!”

I looked at Ixtual, curious to know of what he was thinking. He had withdrawn from us and stood with his back against a sentry post, with his arms folded across his chest, and his head bent forward, staring at the distant temples of his ancestors and in his eyes was a deep and unfathomable sadness. There was heartbreak in them. As I looked he lifted them to mine and, I fancy, understood the sympathy I felt for him. I think it must have been that; for from that hour onward this strange man who regarded me with some distrust, became my friend. It was as if of a sudden we understood each other entirely without the use of words. I can’t tell to this day why I, so rarely impulsive, stepped quickly to his side and said: “Ixtual, if you wish it, I for one will never take a step in that direction over there, will walk back through that passage, and never through life mention it to a living being!”

Quickly he thrust his hand toward mine, and his immobile, grave face broke into a smile. He said something in Maya that I think was a blessing, then, remembering that I did not speak his tongue, reverted to Spanish.

“I thank you for that. I thought you nothing more than a treasure seeker. I was mistaken. I apologize. You are a man of refinement and feeling.” He hesitated for a moment, sighed deeply, and then, resuming all his habitual gravity and dignity, added: “No, I do not wish you to return. It is written here”—and he tapped his breast—“that we are to advance and that good will come of it for my people. A very poor people, it is true, but—my people!”

I looked around at our companions. Wardy was scanning the distance with a tiny pair of glasses that he invariably carried. Benny was calmly rolling a cigarette. But Doctor Morgano was staring at an inscription over the guardhouse, and looking for all the world like a living question mark endowed with a prodigious scowl.

“It is a royal cipher,” he shouted as if disappointed. “Just a royal cipher and nothing more! And that glyph under it dedicated its guardianship to the royal care of those who keep watch. There isn’t a thing of historical value in it!”

“What more do you want?” demanded Wardy with a dry grin. “A poem, or the lines of the last popular song?”

With lofty disdain Doctor Morgano turned his back and said to me: “Had we better bring the outfit through to this side, or leave it with Juan, where it now is, on the other side?”

“We must bring it with us, of course,” I replied. “We might need something to eat when we get down into this valley. And, moreover, you will require notebooks and cameras, and——”

“I’d forgotten all about them. I must have them. But we must lose no time. It is very important that I get over to that island at once. How fortunate it is that it is I, Doctor Paolo Morgano, who am the first to reach here! I, the only living man who can decipher the ancient glyphs.”

We retraced our steps, found Juan sound asleep and entirely incurious and unconcerned regarding us, or what we had seen, or where we were going. We packed our outfits as best we could with what was left of saddle equipment and harness and prepared to pass through the tunnel. Ixtual had assisted with his usual energy but with a certain air of dubiety that was noticeable, somewhat as if his conscience were not entirely easy, and manifested it more plainly just as we were ready to start.

“Señores,” he addressed Wardy and me gravely, “I trust you have no reason to repent the promises you have given me never to lead any one to this spot; for now I do question my own conduct.” Reassured by our replies he turned toward the little archæologist and went on: “Of you, Doctor Morgano, I need have no fear; for you have been accepted as a member of the highest council in my race and by our rites are now a brother of mine. But what of you, Beni Hassan Azdul? Do the men of your tribe ever break the laws of hospitality? Do they betray those who have trusted them?”

“By Allah, no!” declared Benny angrily. “You would have my pledge?” And then turned until he faced the east, suddenly dropped to his knees, bent forward until his forehead touched the earth, raised his hands, and made a vow in rapid Arabic, bowed again, and arose. It was as if something of the Orient had been brought to this strange setting.

“He has sworn to his god in his own tongue, Ixtual,” explained Wardy. “His word will never be broken.”

The Maya bowed his acknowledgment and then turned upon poor Juan, who, stupid and indifferent, appearing almost bored, stood by the side of the mules.

“As for you, peon,” Ixtual said with savage contempt, “if ever you betray by word, sign, or look, that you have passed through the Sacred Gates of the Maya, you shall die unshriven! Your bones shall be scattered like the manure of a traveled road. Your torment shall be passed on to the mother of your children until they curse your name, and by the knife or need for bread they shall die in the streets from which you sprung. I call upon my gods to witness and to watch! Understand?”

Poor Juan! He looked terrified. He was like one beaten to earth under the breath of storm. His eyes bulged, his dark skin turned blue, and his tongue was paralyzed in that moment of stress. All he could do was to swear by all his saints and cross himself, and stammer, and then turn toward his mules as if seeking protection and friendship from those whom he understood.

Ixtual turned to him and said quietly: “All is now well! We go!”

When we again emerged into daylight, we paused for but a few minutes to make certain how the inner gate was raised from outside, and to mark it beyond forgetfulness, then forced our way to the beginning of the great road, above us were many hours of daylight. Beyond us rested an unknown land.

CHAPTER IX.

At some time, when the road was at its best, it had been bordered with low walls and deep gutters. Where the growth had broken the walls and in places filled the gutters with an accumulation of débris, the watercourses had cut new channels and here and there the jungles had actually cut completely across the road; but for the greater part it was in good condition. On either hand were still visible the marks of intensive agriculture or horticulture in the shape of fairly preserved terraces, indicating that the population had at one time been so dense as to necessitate the use of every foot of arable soil. Here and there through jungle openings could be seen ruins of what had been stately homes, and nothing save his intense desire to reach the shores of the lake restrained the doctor from halting to investigate these.

“If ever we turn him loose in here,” Wardy muttered to me with a grin, “we’ll never catch him again without a lot of work; so if he says anything we must do all we can to keep him moving. Eh?”

“He’ll not stop until he reaches those temples, or whatever they are,” I said. “But after that——”

“The biggest job will be to get him to leave. We may have to run a blockade and starve him into submission,” Wardy finished hopefully.

“Not with all that stuff growing wild around here,” I remarked, pointing to a grove of wild banana plants.

But as for the doctor, he rode silently ahead with his nose turning from side to side, birdlike in quickness, for all the world like some old rook seeking a nesting place or something to steal. As we approached the shores of the lake we discovered, to our gratification, that the drive widened and at the edge of the water it formed an esplanade so broad that not even the jungle had been able to mar it. Moreover, there were rows of fine, solid buildings facing the lake as if keeping watch over the island in the center. So well constructed were these that most of them appeared intact. Many of them had been two storied, and several had imposing porticos upheld by monolithic pillars. The roofs of stone were almost as perfect as on the day they had been built, save that nearly all were green with moss, and on some, where by chance vagrant seeds had lodged, stunted trees had found growth as if bent on covering man’s handiwork. We halted and looked about us.

“We had better seek a house that is best preserved,” said Ixtual, breaking the silence that had fallen upon all of us.

“Sounds sensible,” said Wardy, and we dismounted and began our explorations.

“That one over there seems the largest,” said Benny, pointing to one near by, and we moved toward it.

The steps leading up to its porch were hollowed in the center, as if worn by generations of feet, and one of the big stone pillars was cracked but still strongly supporting its burden of weight. The doctor was in advance and would have boldly entered had not Benny called to him:

“Is it not better to be careful lest there be poisonous serpents within?”

And the doctor hesitated with ridiculous quickness, being forever in terror of anything that crawled. But Benny’s fears proved groundless, for in that house we found nothing—positively nothing—alive. A strange feature this, when I come to think of it; for we entered other houses that were alive with venomous serpents, centipedes, and tarantulas. I observed that in these latter cases the walls of the houses, or the roofs, had given way and that the first marks of ruin might have been the signal for the advance of living jungle and desert pests. But the house we entered was still immune.

We stood in a large living room with stone window seats on which were fragments of rubbish that the doctor believed had at some time been cushions, although how he arrived at that conclusion I can not say. To me they were mere heaps of dirt and mold where rain had beaten through in wet seasons. A table of inlaid stone, one of a very few we ever found, and indicating that probably the customary household furniture was of wood, stood in the center of the room. Several carved stone projections, the ends of which were hook-shaped, suggested that at some time tapestries had been hung thereon as wall coverings. Bronze fixtures in the wall evidenced some method of holding lights. Upon a stone shelf were excellent examples of Maya ceramics. Over each of which the doctor rhapsodized. The floor was of inlaid stones of diverse colors formed into a pattern which seemed curiously prevalent in all the Maya decorative designs and was still, after all those ages, intact.

“Knew how to build for keeps, didn’t they?” said Wardy to me, pointing up at the stone rafters overhead that were like the wooden beams of an old Dutch tavern. “No jerry contractors in those days!”

“They certainly knew how to handle stone,” I agreed as we turned through a doorway leading to another room, leaving the doctor behind to fondle the jugs and vases on the shelf.

We found here a room that was nearly bare, and a door leading outward into a paved court, proving that the patio system of architecture was not confined to either the ancient Egyptian courts or to modern Spanish construction. This was bordered by about a dozen rooms, some of which were mere cubicles, and one larger than the rest in which were stone ovens, a huge bronze caldron, and in its exact center under a pile of broken stuff that might have some time been a chimney, what was evidently a fireplace for cooking. The court was rapidly reverting to the jungle, being open and exposed save for the surrounding porticoes.

We returned to the front of the building and found a staircase of stone up which we ascended with doubtful steps. We came into what might have been the sleeping chambers; for in each room we found carved cornices and decorations. In one room we found pathetic relics of some long-dead feminine industry—a few bronze knitting and crocheting needles not unlike those used by the mothers of our time, and in another on a ledge some tiny pots turned from marbles of different hues, proving that even in those far-off days femininity delighted in artificial adornment. A few more odd vases, some heaps of rubbish, accumulations of dust here and there, some lichen,, and that was all.

Despite the protests of the doctor, who wished us all to sift the rubbish we shoveled from the rooms, we fell to making them habitable for our needs, and by nightfall were comfortably ensconsed in our new quarters, commandeered from dead owners.

“I feel like one of the last men on earth,” declared Wardy that night when, after a meal, we walked out along that wide stone esplanade.

“And I, like one who is desecrating something, or trespassing—I’m not certain which,” I replied.

“What interests me most is what lies over yonder,” declared the doctor, pointing toward the mysterious island that, bathed in the summer moonlight of the tropics, shone clear, white, and still, in the midst of waters that were as unmoved as if cast from brilliant glass. We turned and looked at the monolithic stone residences facing the esplanade. The blackness of their windows and doorways were like calm, inscrutable eyes, watching our every movement and scorning us for the brevity of our lives while theirs were numbered by centuries.

“I don’t like it, sir,” wailed Benny in Arabic to Wardrop. “They are ghosts.”

“Nonsense! They are merely tenements to let,” Wardy rejoined; but I think I caught an inflection in his voice which indicated that he, too, had not entirely missed that peculiar feeling of superstition. Moreover, I noted that all of us seemed under some restraint of silence, that conversation lagged; that not even the sometimes voluble doctor had much to say, and that I for one was glad when we turned in.

On the following morning the doctor was apathetic. I first saw him in the bright sunshine out in front of this residence we had commandeered, staring, as if fascinated, at the island and its buildings that somehow seemed the key of all mysteries. It was as if he had lost all interest in that research which was accessible.

“We must get over there! We must!” he exclaimed when I spoke to him. “But how are we to do it? I must say that as a man in charge of an expedition, you have proved singularly shortsighted.”

“What’s the matter now?” I demanded. “What have I forgotten?”

“You should have brought a boat,” he said in all seriousness. “What are we to do without a boat?”

“Build a raft, man,” I replied in no very good humor. “It’s not more than a mile across to that island.”

“Sapristi! Wonderful! I never thought of that! A raft—that’s the thing!” he shouted with an enthusiasm that convinced me he had expressed the truth.

“All right!” he exclaimed again. “Come on. Let’s build it and get across there. How—how does one build a raft? I never saw one.”

He learned how, all right, in that forenoon when, under the sage advice of Ixtual, we cut logs of a lightness that would float, and sweated and dragged and hauled them out of that poisonous wilderness where heat, gnats, thorns, vines, and an occasional snake made the job anything but a holiday. But no one worked harder than the doctor, after all, so complaints are unwarranted. Fortunately, I had brought three or four of the simplest tools with us, including an auger; we had spikes, and by that night we had our raft completed, after which by lantern light inside our quarters we laboriously hewed out our sweeps.

When we awoke, prepared to venture, a gentle breeze was blowing so favorably for our purpose that we stepped a crude mast and with tent canvas for sail made our final preparations to embark. We loaded food and supplies aboard, left our animals in their improvised stalls with sufficient food and water to last for at least two or three days, barricaded them in lest some jaguar scenting prey emerge from the wilderness, and, for the first time in days as merry as a party of boys, cast off. No argonauts in quest of adventure ever set sail with more ardor. True, our voyage was not long, but it flavored so much of assailing the unknown that it was enjoyable. From some recess of his brain Wardy elicited an old piratical song that he bellowed hoarsely as he and Benny labored at one of the long sweeps. The breeze assisted us mightily and our raft made great progress.

“There’s a quay ahead to the right,” called the doctor, who alone did no work and had an unobstructed view from the bows of our raft.

“Aye, aye, sir! Point to starboard it is!” bawled Wardy, as if he were taking orders.

And slowly we crept forward until it was decided best to lower our sail and inspect what lay ahead of us. We had hoped vaguely, I think, for some sign of human occupation; but there, even more than on the mainland, was lifelessness. A broad and noble quay ascended from the water’s edge by a splendid and impressive flight of a hundred steps, very like some I had seen in Odessa. On each side were ornate columns covered with hieroglyphics and surmounted by huge bowls that may have been used for fires or for plants. We remained uncertain which, although the doctor said he doubted not that they had been used for both. We moored our raft and landed.

“Now,” said the doctor briskly, “I must decipher these inscriptions at once.”

“You can stop here if you wish,” said Wardy, “but as for me, I’m going to see if there’s a pub, or a cinema show in this place. By the way, what’s its name? Have you found that out yet?”

The doctor somewhat sulkily said he hadn’t, and then decided that perhaps he might accomplish more by remaining with us. So together we climbed that long flight of steps, then halted at the top overcome by the stateliness of our surroundings.

The tops of the steps were flanked by two great obelisks and beyond lay a horseshoe-shaped plaza a full hundred yards across. It was entirely bordered by one great low, massive building with a deep portico in front supported by columns that were square and were completely sculptured with hieroglyphics. The columns were without capitals and the roof deep and flat, giving an impression of great solidity. The edge of the roof was without cornices, but this, projecting beyond its supporting columns, was also entirely sculptured with historical scenes. The portico was fully thirty feet in depth. The entire plaza was paved with a mosaic so smooth and firm that not even a seed of grass had found lodgment thereon, and, cleaned by wind, sun, and dew, it was as if it had been garnished for our coming. At the upper end of this great space, and directly opposite us, where in a horseshoe would be found the Central caulk, the structure assumed greater importance not unlike the Pantheon save that we could see through its center where a great arch opened toward whatever lay behind.

“There’s glyphs enough on those columns, Doctor Morgano, to keep you busy for a year,” said Wardy, not without a slight tinge of irony. “And just take a look at the sculpture on the edge of that roof! Battles, priests, vestal virgins, plain hoi-polloi and proletariat; kings, iduanas, chiefs, and high muck-a-mucks by the thousand. But not a horse in sight. Nothing but bullocks, llamas, and——”

“Llamas? What? Where?” demanded the doctor in a frenzy of excitement, and then on these being pointed out said, gravely: “Most important discovery! Most important! Shows the possibility of this civilization and that of Peru being akin. I congratulate you on this very important find.” And then he rushed over to Wardrop and seized his hand and shook it vigorously. “In my notes you shall have credit for this, sir. You shall, on the word of Paolo Morgano!”

"Er—er—thanks!” replied Wardy, somewhat overcome. “Hadn’t we better get on with the work?”

Ixtual, impatient with delay, followed by Benny, had already started away from us toward the main building and archway, and we followed, the doctor in the rear and constantly looking over his shoulder, as if fearing that those records upon the columns might vanish. He moved with great reluctance while the others led with impatient eagerness. Through the archway we came to a long narrow quadrangle, paved like the great place we had first invaded and surrounded by buildings which were evidently either minor temples or the abode of priests, guards, or priestesses.

The great avenue led onward to spaces where isolated buildings lifted themselves somberly from smooth rocks so destitute of soil and moisture that all the original vegetation with which it may have been clothed had died for want of nourishment.

We decided the island must originally have been a barren mass of rock cut and shaped and terraced to suit its occupants’ tastes, and there were evidences that in its past days of glory artificial gardens had been cultivated with an extraordinary amount of labor and care. But for these we had at that moment scant thought, for the great road now led upward to the peak we had seen from the mainland, the peak that proved to be partly artificial and partly natural and which was crowned by the greatest structure of all, the one that we afterward referred to as the Great Temple.

The reason for the peculiar and beautiful whiteness of this hill was now visible; for, from bottom to top, it was overlaid, as were the Egyptian pyramids when originally constructed, with marble so smooth and perfectly joined and fitted as to form practically a solid shell. But here no vandals had stripped it away or marred its symmetry. It was intact, impregnably defying the elements and time.

We gazed at it in awe, thinking of the hundreds of years required for its making; of the tens of thousands of men who had toiled upon its creation in those distant ages when this was the most densely populated and most highly civilized portion of the earth.

“This,” said Ixtual to me with a wave of his hands and arms, “was the work of my people. And yet white men call us today ‘poor Indians!’ and deride us, and—hire us as laborers. To such low state have my people fallen. And this”—and again he made that eloquent, impressive gesture—“tells of what we were!”

Steadily we ascended, pausing now and then to look back on the roofs of temples and buildings beneath, and at the watchful and far-lined row of buildings across the lake from whence we had embarked on our raft. Wardy and I once picked out the place from which we had first sighted this island, and fancied we could descry the opening of the great cavern from which the white highway sprang. Miles distant it now was, but we felt that we knew it well. The twin peaks in all their grandeur, towered high above us all as a lasting landmark; as if they still stood sentry though all men they had watched and guarded were dead,

And so, in time, ever climbing, we reached to the Great Temple. We came to the great flat place whereon it stood, a square made on the mountain top, paved, guarded by stone walls, and on whose four sides the multitude of a people might have assembled when priestly kings wished to speak, or when unkingly priests might wish to preach. An enormous structure it was and doubtless still is, impressive for its size alone, impressive again because it appeared the embodiment of power, of rule, of organization, and of the ideals of a race. We had called it the Great Temple, and unwittingly we had named it well. For on earth there are but few such monuments as this to races, living or lost.

We entered it as might men overawed by its prodigious significance. Our alien boot heels ringing upon its sacred floors sounded profane. Its great arches and groins and spaces seemed to frown upon us pygmies who had thus dared to enter it after all its long rest in solitude. We drew closer into a group as if seeking the strength of human companionship in this peculiarly dignified awfulness of desertion. Colossal stone statues of dead emperors, priests, rulers, and kings frowned upon us; scores of them sitting in state as we walked through toward the center of this Valhalla. And there, in the very center of all, in a spacious place where lesser gods were represented, we found an effigy, idol, or presentation, as one may decide, of what was probably Icopan, supreme god of the Maya race—perhaps of the Aztecs, of the Quichuas, and so on down to those Incas of the southern continent for whom, alike, this may have been the sacred shrine, the mecca of their faith!

Upon a base twenty feet high and fifty square towered that unequaled image, seated, squat and stern, and the sun rays of its crown were full eighty feet above us. It leaned forward in the attitude of that famous piece of sculpture by Rodin, “The Thinker.” It looked down upon us, and in its somber face and contemplative stare there seemed the mystery of all the ages combined; the aloof wisdom and sternness of a veritable divinity. It sat beneath a circular opening in the apex of the domed roof as if enthroned in a place upon which the sun might shine. It was as if we, unannounced, stood at the feet of a living god.

For a moment we stood spellbound and then Doctor Morgano, as if unable to restrain his curiosity, sprang forward, and upon a structure not unlike a pulpit, where, I suppose, the high priest of the Mayas stood when delivering an edict. I saw that he was intent on reading a single glyph above it, and he turned his back toward us and lifted both hands as if to catch a projection and pull himself upward for a better view. His fingers were almost catching hold when there was a single scream as of a man in terror, and Ixtual had thrown himself upon the stone pavement, groveling, crying, and uttering what I surmise were appeals for pardon. Somehow his cries broke the spell and I ran to him and lifted him up, solicitous for his sanity. Wardrop hurried to my assistance and caught his other arm.

“Stop it! Stop, Ixtual!” he shouted, his great voice roaring and rebounding from the hollows about us. “Don’t be a fool!”

And then he lifted and shook him as a terrier might a rat. Suddenly he laid him down again and then, bending forward above him said, in a quiet voice: “We’d better carry him out. The poor devil has fainted. Give us a hand, Hallewell. This won’t do at all.”

I hastened to assist him, and we bore the Maya out to that broad terrace, where from a pocket flask we trickled brandy down his throat until he revived, and, weak and helpless, sat up and leaned his head in the hollow of my arm.

Was it superstition, or something else, that prevented him from ever again entering the Great Temple? I cannot answer. But this I know, that he never did. And if it was merely superstition inherited, why was it that from that hour neither Beni Hassa Azdul nor Juan, the humble muleteer, could ever again be induced to step beyond these frowning portals? Again I cannot answer. But, again, they never did. It seems incredible that a mere thing of sculptured stone should have such an effect upon men, yet upon these three the effect was produced and permanently remained.

CHAPTER X.

Doctor Morgano stood to one side with his arms folded as if either intensely bored, or considering some mental problem pertaining to ancient forms of worship. Ixtual having partially regained his senses, suddenly threw himself on his knees before the doctor and bent forward until his head touched the pavement. The archæologist abstractly said something in the Maya tongue and, discovering the need for pacifying Ixtual lest the latter go insane, reached over and gently assisted him to his feet. He talked to him in a fatherly sort of way and then said in Spanish:

“Perhaps, it is best that you and the Arab and Juan return to the raft and bring up the provisions and find a place in the outer circle that will do for our quarters. Forget the gods, my son. They do but forgive if you believe you have done them wrong. They are very merciful, otherwise there would be no gods. Go. We shall come later.”

And so, strangely pacified and returning to his normal senses, Ixtual with Benny and Juan accompanying him as if eager to escape, hurried away. Benny went hurriedly with a long, swinging, graceful stride that made me think he had reverted to the burnoose and flowing robes of the desert. Juan was crossing himself, and I have an idea was muttering prayers; but Ixtual, as if obedient to a command, never looked back.

“The poor Indian is upset,” said the doctor. “I can’t imagine such folly, but I suppose that——”

“That bally old idol did look as if it was alive; but of course it was all some sort of trickery,” growled Wardy.

“Trickery?” the doctor and I spoke in unison and considerably surprised by his words.

“Why, yes. Trickery! Didn’t you see it open its eyes and glare at us? By Jove! There was something uncanny in the way they scowled and flashed at us, wasn’t there?”

“You haven’t gone balmy, too, have you?” I demanded. “What are you talking about? Rubbish!”

“Rubbish, nothing! If neither you nor the doctor saw that thing’s eyes glare, you must have been looking at something else. I tell you I saw them. It wasn’t as if they opened, but as if they had suddenly come to life and the old chap was pretty sore about something.”

“Ha! We must investigate this,” said the doctor, turning and almost running back into that inner chamber.

We stood looking at that great effigy for some time but could observe nothing unusual about it beyond that majestic and impressive workmanship which I had already noted.

“You see, Wardy,” I jeered, “its eyes are just as they were when we first saw them.”

But as if doubting his own senses, or at least very dissatisfied, Wardy took out his monocle, carefully cleaned it, and frowned upward at that impassive idol. He stepped sideways for a few paces as if to see whether the change of position produced the effect, tried the other side, fell back, then again moved forward.

“I’ll swear I couldn’t have been mistaken,” he murmured. “I saw it too plainly, and was just going to speak when Ixtual went off his crumpet. You were standing about where you are now. I was just about here. The doctor had started up there to—— Hold on! I believe I’ve got it.”

He shouted the last words and then laughed.

“Doctor,” he said, “would you mind doing just what you did before—if you can remember what it was?”

The savant for an instant blinked as if bewildered by the effort of memory, rubbed his chin, and then said: “Oh, yes! I recall that I was interested in getting to where I could read that tablet above the altar. From where I stood I could not see it. I must look at that now. Whether the eyes of this image shone or not are of the very least importance; but I must see that tablet! Perhaps it is of great scientific value. Who knows, my friends, but what it may contain the very key to that ancient form of worship! We will defer the investigation of your—ummmh—hallucination, and I will continue my great work.”

And with that, as if dismissing us to our own researches, he again advanced toward the image. I was on the point of retorting somewhat sarcastically to his speech, but was silenced by a swift gesture from Wardy which the archæologist did not observe. The doctor, as if forgetting us entirely, again climbed upward to the pulpit and again, finding the tablet too high above his head for close inspection, stepped forward and lifted his hands upward to clutch a projection by which he might lift himself up. And then, for the first time, I saw the eyes of the idol blaze as if filled with wrath! I admit that the sight was terrifying to me, so what must have it been to those superstitious minds that had witnessed it before?

“Stop! Stand where you are!” roared Wardrop in a voice so loud that it resounded thunderously in that space. “Stand just as you are, doctor, and don’t move until I get up there.”

He ran forward and climbed up beside the doctor and bent over and marked with a piece of chalk the outlines of the astonished savant’s feet.

“Keep your eyes on those of this bally image, Hallewell,” he shouted to me, and I kept my gaze steadily thereafter upon the glowing lights above. Somehow they seemed less terrifying and less intent, under the caustic, practical admonitions of this big, practical Englishman who conducted the investigation.

“Now, doctor, come over here,” I heard Wardy say, and there was the sound of movement, and the eyes of the image were again dull and lifeless, as if once more brooding over the past ages.

“They’re dark again!” I cried. “You were right, Wardy. You were right. It is nothing but some sort of mechanical trickery.”

“Of course I’m right,” jubilated the giant. “Have another look. I’ll work it myself!” and then he stepped over, placed his feet in the spots he had marked, and again the light glazed forth above us.

“Which foot is it? Let’s see,” he called, and stood on one foot and then the other to learn that it required pressure on two spots, upon which the doctor had unwittingly stood, to produce the effect. “You come up and stand on ’em, and give me a chance to look,” Wardy called to me, and I took his place while he, highly triumphant, stood beneath and watched the effect; but the doctor, caring nothing for our investigations, had climbed upward until he could see the tablet plainly, and now called down: “The tablet is to the god Icopan, supreme over all the Maya world, sacred to the Maya religion; a god of gods; presumably the god of the sun, and for the first time known to modern civilization. We have made the greatest discovery of its kind that has been made in hundreds of years!”

“I suppose,” said Wardy, still intent on his own find, “that on days when they had something to tell the roughnecks—for instance, that the fat old god here was exceedingly sore about something they had done—the high priest got ’em here and then pressed the button. Some effect—what? Scared ’em stiff, I’ll bet!”

“What on earth is the sense in talking to a pair of narrow-minded, unappreciative, irreverent numskulls like this?” howled the doctor, throwing his hands and arms in the air and shaking them like a pair of agitated tentacles. “Here am I, Doctor Paolo Morgano, the greatest discoverer of the age, distinguished internationally for my erudition, lecturing to a pair of impractical, illogical beings who have found and play with a mere toy!”

That we both laughed did not appease his frenzy, and he threatened to leave us in a state of mad exasperation.

“My dear doctor,” said Wardy apologetically, “we can’t all be practical and gifted like you. I beg your pardon. And so, I’m certain, does Hallewell. You were saying that this was the great god—— What’s his name? Please tell us. We are most interested!”

And, mollified, Doctor Morgano again enthused over his glyph, while we stood patiently waiting for him to conclude, which he did when he had run down like a clock.

“Now,” he finished cheerfully, “it is certain that the high priests who guarded such a holy of holies as this must have lived in its immediate proximity. I doubt not that, day and night, some of them stood watch by the entrance, over which there were probably hung huge curtains to protect it from the ordinary scrutiny. We may be certain that when those curtains were parted it was on the rarest and most important of dates. Perhaps these came but once or twice within a generation; perhaps on set days when an appeal was made to the god for rain to save the burning crops, or to allay floods that threatened national calamity. You must try and realize that from the Maya viewpoint you are in the presence of the supreme god of the universe.”

He paused impressively and then, as if completely satisfied by the deportment of his audience, said: “We will now explore the surrounding chambers where, doubtless, the keepers of this shrine lived.”

He headed the expedition and Wardy, lagging behind, whispered: “By Jove! If Thos. Cook & Son knew about him they’d give him a contract for life.”

But our investigations proved the doctor wrong in his surmise. The entire series of inner chambers, looking out from between their massive columns, were devoted to lesser gods. They were like the abodes of supernumerary divinities. There were haymakers and rainmakers; fish gods and gods that restrained the serpents; gods that increased families and gods that restrained their exuberance; gods for almost everything and, as a rule, they weren’t exactly prepossessing. Most of them were, indeed, rather ugly. I conjectured that those who appealed to them were ruled by fear rather than affection. And yet I tell you that the pavement in front of some of these was worn into hollows where the knees of devout thousands had knelt!

“The priests must have lived somewhere close by,” said Doctor Morgano, perplexed and dubious as if he had proven a false prophet. “That, we know, was invariably the custom. There must be some place where those who guarded the god lived.”

“Maybe it was through that narrow door in the center—the one over there that we missed,” suggested Wardy.

“Ah, the one I believed an exit,” said the doctor. “Very well. We will try that one.”

We entered a corridor, followed it for some distance, and then debouched into what had apparently been a communal room; for from its spaciousness led many doors. One after another we entered. They were alike, austere, small, more like cells than human habitations. They were uniform—always the same, with the same narrow but long window opening out to the afternoon sun and presenting a magnificent vista of distant mountain and intervening jungle, bordered always by the waters of the turquoise lake. Always there was the same stone bed, the single shelf of stone, and the solitary niche with a basin of stone cut therein as if to enable its user to perform the simple ablutions of a simple life. In none of them was there a decoration, nor a decorative object. In all were those simple heaps of dust telling of long-decayed garniture. And then we came to the greater cell that in a measuse explained all.

“This one looks as if it had been something more than a cell in a monastery,” said Wardy, who was now leading the way. “This is getting rather slow. Too much like looking for an unfurnished flat in London. All look alike. All empty.” Then there was a moment’s silence and an exclamation, “Hey! What’s this? Come here, you fellows!”

Morgano and I obeyed his call and entered a room larger than those we had peered into, a room with four window openings. In the middle of it stood Wardrop with a human skull in his hand.

“There seems to be several of them here,” he said as we stopped and stared at him. “I picked this one up because it happened to be the nearest. Take a look around you, and you’ll see what I mean.”

With no very happy curiosity I looked and saw that the remains of at least a dozen men were in that death chamber. I felt their presence. I stood as one in a charnel house, although these remnants of skeletons were merely the bones of men whose souls had passed for hundreds of years. But the doctor, heedless of the gruesome relics, moved about the room like a hunting dog that scents game. He stopped and then squatted down beside one heap that was immediately in front of a central window. He hastily clutched something from the pavement and examined it. I saw that it was another stone tablet on which were sculptured, shallowly, as if the writer were in haste, a message. Doctor Morgano was dusting it with great care, and studying it, as if the man who had done the work and who now lay at his feet but a collection of half-eroded bones was nothing of interest. He seemed puzzled by some of the characters, held the long, narrow tablet up to the window where the sun, now past its meridian, was staring through, and with a grunt of annoyance said: “I’ll have to consult some notes to read this. What a pity that I haven’t them with me. They must be down in my portmanteau. I must get them.”

“I’m rather glad to hear that,” said Wardy in a most matter-of-fact voice. “I’m hungry. And as far as I can see, we haven’t discovered anything at all to eat. This will keep, won’t it, until afternoon?”

The doctor looked as if his feelings were hurt, and then, somewhat reluctantly, but still hugging his precious slab of stone, followed us out and down the hillside.

We found our three companions waiting for us in front of a building in the “Horseshoe Plaza”—as we called it, irreverently—and on our approach Benny, who was the cook for the party, hastened away to the quarters they had decided upon for our camp. We had to urge the doctor to join us in the very good camp meal that Benny laid upon a stone table in what had evidently been a refrectory well provided with stone benches. The doctor had found his notes and was himself again. But it was not until we had finished that luncheon that he imparted to us his information. And even then he waited until we three were alone in the room. He apologized for his delay by saying, “I thought it might be as well, considering the way our men have acted, that I waited to read this until they were all absent. It is a highly important record. It deals with the tragic history of a once noble race. It is in a way the solution of a question that has engrossed the minds of archæologists for centuries. It supplies one of the most vital blanks in the chain of——”

“By the will of the gods we, the last of the keepers of the sacred place, are to die. And by the will of my brothers who guard the last fires on the sacred altars, I, the priest of records, am to strive to finish my task before the great plague which has already laid its hand upon me, ends my mortal life. Of all those of our once great people who dwelt by the borders of the sacred lake, and of the priests of the Holy Island, all are fled, or dead, save we who, with fidelity, abide to the last in this room. We who have been initiated into the secrets of the Mountains of the Sacred Gods have, obedient to the inspired ancient commands, cast loose the great bridge above the chasm that the sacred temple of the god Icopan may remain inviolate until it is HIS WILL that it again be visited. We, his priests, have no knowledge of how long the great god Icopan may choose to rest. The key tablets to the deep treasure chambers of the sacred god have been left in his possession and care guarded by his feet.”

“What’s that? What’s that he says about the key tablets?” I interrupted, and the doctor lifted his eyes and glared at me as if shocked by some profanity.

He read that part over again and then mumbled ahead with his translation. It told how this priest and that one had been stricken by this unknown plague and died. It must have been deadly swift, for according to the record a man lived not more than three or four hours after the first symptom manifested itself. The last sentences of the tablet were rather interesting:

“My own time has come and I am the last alive. The marks are on me, and my heart struggles. This is the last of the soft stones at hand and, write rapidly as I can, I grow too weak to add more than that the treasure chambers are sealed with the great seal which to break save by will of the great god Icopan means——”

The doctor laid down his paper and said: “That is all. Now from this I have learned a most interesting geological feature, which is that the ancients had here on this continent certain stone formations probably like those in the deeper caverns of Bourre in France which the Romans worked. A stone which, when removed from the earth was of a cheeselike softness, but that hardened rapidly when exposed to the air. That accounts for the profuse decorations, records, and sculpturing that we have seen. I believe that a similar stone is quarried, shaped, and used in Somersetshire, England, to this day, and is known commonly as Bath stone. This stone, a yellow limestone from the Lower Oolite, although it hardens from exposure, cannot possess the durability of the stone so lavishly utilized by the Mayas. In geology there are several distinct variations in the composition of——”

I made an excuse to get outside. I thought I knew as much about geology as was either practical or good for me. It is disastrous to know too much; but when I returned a half hour later Wardy was serenely asleep in his corner, and the doctor was still talking learnedly.

“Isn’t it about time we investigated that idol’s feet?” I asked.

“Oh,” said the doctor slowly, facing me. “I had forgotten all about that part of the tablet. Perhaps we should take a look for what are called the key tablets. They might—ummh—might be of great historical interest.”

CHAPTER XI.

After long consideration, I am convinced that the three of us who stood at the foot of the idol that afternoon were possessed by three distinct incentives. Doctor Morgano desired nothing but knowledge of a very long-dead past, Wardrop was merely engaged in a curious adventure, and I, being neither archæologist nor millionaire but more of adventurer, craved wealth. True, I was profoundly interested in those long-dead peoples and their ways; but I thought I could study their history with far greater assurance of mind if removed from the necessity of wanting money in the very imminent future. I have read and heard of philosophers in garrets with empty stomachs, and let me admit here and now that I’m not built that way. I believe I think better when mine is full. I’m a strong, healthy, animal man with but little of that ethereal endowment upon which poets are said to thrive. Plainly, I wanted to find that treasure, and had come along way imbued with that hope.

“I’ll swear I can’t see anything at that blessed old god’s feet!” said Wardy, after studying the carved toes of the great god Icopan through his monocle, and strolling completely around him several times.

“Isn’t it possible that we have to dig under them?” I asked. “All I can discover are the stone blocks on which they rest and of which they appear to be a part, and then, beneath that, a rather badly designed mosaic.”

“That pattern of mosaic, my friend,” interjected the doctor sourly, “is probably symbolical. Its meaning is yet undisclosed; but these were a people who did not think as we do. Everything about such an edifice as this was a symbol, or utilitarian, or intended to preserve a secret.”

“All of which doesn’t help to find the chronicled keys,” I retorted, and Wardy grinned.

He moved to and fro beneath the frowning eyes of the god, while Doctor Morgano stalked here and there, presumably seeking inscriptions. Nonplused and disappointed by failure, I stood outside scanning the towering crown of that enormous image.

“Let’s make him blink,” said Wardy as if uttering a joke.

I shifted my scrutiny to the idol’s eyes. They remained blank.

“Are they still ugly and awesome?” asked Wardy with a laugh.

“What do you mean?”

“Didn’t they flare and glare when I stepped on the right spots?”

“Did you step on the stones we marked?” I queried.

“I certainly did. Here, let’s try again. How’s that?”

The eyes of the image continued as before, somber and brooding. In vain I looked for that pallid ferocity that had startled us all that forenoon. In vain Wardy made certain of his pressure. The eyes no longer responded to the touch of feet.

“Can you see any tablets there at all?” I asked hopefully.

“No,” he replied slowly, “I can’t; but—peculiar! Most peculiar!”

“What is?” I ventured to disturb him.

“Why this—and this—and—-they look like broken sections of characters; as if hieroglyphics had been formed, then deliberately cut into sections like one of those jigsaw puzzle pictures. I wonder if these, reassembled in proper shape, might not tell something?”

I was instantly hopeful, and Wardy complimented the savant on his ingenuity.

Wardy and I were left to our own devices the next morning, and entered many of the sometime luxurious buildings behind the temple. In many of them were tablets and sculptured pillars, leading Wardy to remark that if Morgano remained until he had read all these, he would be a very old man before his departure. We were talking in this strain as we returned through the temple intent on reaching our quarters for lunch, and Wardy paused and stared up at the god.

“Funny about those eyes,” he said thoughtfully. “Can’t understand why they went out of commission. I’m more puzzled by that than anything we have yet found up here.”

He climbed the steps, his boot heels ringing sharply on the stone and bringing back a chorus of echoes from the vaulted surroundings, and again stepped on the tablets. Instantly the eyes of the image responded and with a fiercer, more fiery, more brilliant glare than we had before observed. They were so devilishly alive and gleaming that I uttered an exclamation that brought Wardy down with the request that I step up and show him the effect.

“By Jove! The old chap is certainly far angrier than he was yesterday. What’s the answer?”

We worked it several times more to assure ourselves that it was not in the least intermittent before continuing on our way.

“I suggest we say nothing to the doctor about this—if he is still working on that puzzle,” I said. “If he will only keep on trying to tell us where the treasure is, I, for one, don’t feel like distracting him.”

“Right-o! And—why shouldn’t we have a research party of our own?” Wardy halted and chuckled and twinkled his monocle at me. “Suppose you and I quietly loot a hatchet or an ax, and put in the afternoon finding out how the blessed thing works? If the doctor knew he might either object or insist on being there—eh?”

Fortune favored us; for the doctor had not solved his problem, and Juan, Benny, and Ixtual were to cross to the mainland, replenish the supplies for the mules, and bring back more for our own consumption, so we could be certain of working unmolested and could have not only axes and hatchets but machetes. We lost no time in beginning, and fell upon the stone slabs that worked the mechanism as our first point of attack. We pried and tried the blades of axes and hatchets and the points of machetes to pry one of these loose; but they were as immune as adamant and the stonework so cleverly joined that we could no more than insert the barest edges of our blades. We rested and discussed the advisability of smashing them with an ax.

“Why not smash one of those surrounding it?” said Wardy. “That shouldn’t break the mechanism of the thing.” And on my assenting struck a slab close to one of the movable tablets. The result was entirely unexpected. It did not break but sunk downward a full inch. He struck again, and it lowered still another inch. Once more he brought the ax down upon it and now a whole section of the pavement began slowly to move as if collapsing.

“Look out! It may drop us into a hole!” I cried, leaping back, as did Wardy, and watching the slow lowering of the mass. It stopped at last and we went cautiously forward and looked into the cavity. We flashed an electric torch into the darkness and saw that at about four feet depth the trap door had tilted, exposing a narrow flight of steps. We carefully blocked the trap to prevent its resuming its place through any device of cunning, and lowered ourselves downward. Flashing the light about us, we learned that the stepping tablets were merely the tops of cunningly contrived levers that acted together upon another, but separately were useless. The narrow flight of steps led upward, following round and round the interior of the great image, and so narrow were they and so unprotected at the side, that it was not a very inviting task to ascend them. Above us was complete darkness.

I took the lead, being the smaller of the two, and began to climb. For me it was not difficult; but for my companion it was extremely trying, as he had to climb upward step by step with his back against the wall, the narrowness of the steps and the breadth of his shoulders making it impossible for him to ascend otherwise.

Always there was the acute knowledge that if we fell, we must certainly be dashed to pieces in the well-like hollow below. Although we judged that the image was about eighty feet in height from the floor of the temple, it seemed hundreds before we began to approach the top and then we came to a little opening, climbed through, panting with exertion, dripping from the tropical heat without intensified by the confinement of the interior shaft, and found ourselves in a tiny cell and surrounded by strange mechanical appliances.

The great metal rod that had been visible in the center of the shaft throughout our ascent, was attached to something directly over our heads. In front of us was a curious contrivance not unlike a huge system of modern megaphones supplementing one another until all their sounds concentrated upon a narrow slit. We crawled beneath these and peered through. The floor of the temple, sun-bathed here and there, with its great columns, lay exposed to our view. It appeared far beneath, with that strange exaggeration of height which comes from peering through a confined opening at an altitude. The pillars appeared squatty and low.

“We are looking through a slit in the lips of the idol! One that wasn’t visible from below,” I said, discovering the meaning. “A priest could come here, after fasting himself until he thought he was inspired, and be the voice of the god.”

“Stay here and I’ll get back and yell through the contraption,” said Wardy, and soon after I could hear through the slit the bellowing echoes of his voice magnified by mechanism and resounding with tempestuous roars from the interior of the temple. I am sorry to say that the words were inappropriate, being akin to those which are attributed to the governors of North and South Carolina on their first august meeting and suggesting that it was time to “have something!”

When it was my time to yell for Wardy’s edification, I was fortunate enough to recall a few lines from the “immortal bard,” for which I am thankful because in them was no desecration.

Our attention was now turned to the rod that climbed upward and to more narrow steps by which the top was reached. For a time we could not fathom its working, but at last Wardy stood below and catching the rod with his hands swung his weight upon it. Suddenly the darkness disappeared and the little cell was brilliant with light. It was then that we solved the mystery of the eyes.

The levers acted upon a huge tilting plate of burnished metal, a reflector that for skillful shaping, and knowledge of optical laws, could scarcely be bettered in our own times. Neither Wardy nor I could be certain of its composition, but were agreed that quicksilver entered into it, even as it does in the construction of a modern reflector. The tilting of this slid backward a carefully constructed cover above in a huge circular opening in the head of the image, that when closed protected the reflector from dust, or rain, or exposure from the opening in the roof of the temple that was now directly above us. This opening, from the floor of the Great Temple, had appeared small; but now, when immediately beneath it, we saw that it was at least eight feet in diameter.

We had observed the effect of the sole protected reflector cast through the eyes of the image. What, then, must have been their brilliance in those dead days when priests carefully polished and maintained the reflectors from above? The eyes of the image must have been terrifying in their concentrated light, when glowering upon those already and previously prepared through superstition to gaze upon a miracle. Doubtless the eyes could be made to glare only when the sun was at its meridian. Once it passed the effect diminished until, in late afternoon, those fearsome eyes would never have responded to the priestly touch beneath. And now we remembered that this image was a god of the sun, speaking or issuing edicts at noon only, when the sun was in the maximum of glory and light.

“I suppose we should go down and tell the doctor about this,” I said, feeling that we were cutting him out of our discovery.

“But should we tell him about these?” said Wardy, indicating the numerous glyphs inscribed about the wall of the little cell. “He’s likely to break his neck getting up here to study them. It seems like—like cruelty to animals!”

But that point was decided for us unexpectedly; for when we descended and climbed out of the hole like jacks in a box, we found the doctor there waiting, and vastly pleased with himself.

“I was right! I was right! The reading was characteristic of an adroit and ingenious as well as superstitious people,” he declared. And then before I could ask if he had the directions to find the treasure he went on: “It puts the curse of the sun god on any who walk across this pavement save those of the higher priesthood. It declares that none but those who are able to decipher it unaided are entitled to know the secrets concealed beneath.”

“But I tell you that there is no treasure under this big dummy!” I interrupted, hot and wearied by physical effort, and in no mood to listen to one of his interminable lectures. “All we have found is the machinery by which this image was given a pretense of life, and a lot of carvings that were undoubtedly directions how it is to be kept oiled, and in working condition, and cautioning the hands about paying attention to time and secrecy.”

“Carvings?” blandly inquired the doctor. “Carvings? Where are they?” And then I saw that I had made a mistake.

“They are up in a top chamber,” said Wardy, “but you will find them difficult and dangerous to reach. You had best——”

But there was no need for him to finish his advice, for the archæologist had dropped down into the pit and was striking wax tapers to find his way up the steps. We succeeded in calling him back and giving him a torch which he fairly snatched from my hand.

When we returned to the temple the doctor had learned the way to close the trap-door in the pavement and had done so, and was sweeping the dust into the crevices to hide them from casual discovery.

“Expecting competition?” asked Wardy dryly.

“One never can tell,” replied the doctor. “I may wish to come here again and—the secret might be useful. I shall preserve it for the time being. Oddly enough, the inscriptions above puzzle me. They are a variation of the customary glyphs. I can’t be quite certain of their meaning—probably some secret form known to the high priests only.”

So absorbed was he in thought that he almost ran away from us, and when we returned that night he was still working over his problem in the little room he had adopted for his own use. Once, hours later, when momentarily awakening from my sleep, I saw that his light was still burning and I could descry his shadow, hawk-nosed, high-forheaded, with ruffled hair, appearing like a caricature on the wall as if to exaggerate all his peculiarities.

He was at it again the next forenoon while Wardy and I took an inventory of our remaining supplies and reached the sad conclusion that now our time was limited to but a day or two longer. We were discussing the possibility of sending Ixtual and Juan out through the mountain with the pack mules to obtain food, and depending upon our rifles to supply us with meat until their return, when the doctor came hurrying out to us, caught himself when he saw that Benny and Ixtual were within hearing, and motioned to us to follow him. His air was one of triumphant exultation and mystery as he conducted us back to the temple. He looked around as if to make certain that the place was not crowded. Perhaps it was—with ghosts! He pulled us close to him and mumbled his paean of victory:

“I have discovered it! Learned the lost secrets of their religion! Learned the very tenets of their creed. Ah, those marvelous inscriptions up there in that sacred and secret cell—in that holy of holies. Magnificent religion! Austere, noble, lofty, beneficent, and benevolent! I tell you that in its simplicity and grandeur it deserved perpetuity. While in a sense it was patriarchal and socialistic, it yet permitted advancement and distinction to those individuals who soberly worked and studied, and became worthy of reward and emolument. Think of it. I have brought it to light again an actual religious creed. One that will benefit our fellow men, and all—my dear friends!—through your instrumentality.”

He turned and led us silently out toward the front of the temple, where he paused and swept his eyes over that wonderful collection of buildings, the great plaza, and then onward to the blue lake and far-lying shores. They came to rest at last on the towering twin peaks in the distance through whose foundations we had found our way. The sight of them standing there, majestic, unchanged, appeared to recall something forgotten, for he turned to me and said:

“By the way, Hallewell, I have also learned the secret of their treasury chambers and how to open them. They are—over there, underneath those hills. I made you a promise a long, long time ago, it now seems to me—back there in Paris—and to-morrow shall endeavor to pay my debt.”

“Doctor,” said I with marvelous restraint, “I shall be glad; because our supplies are nearly at end. Our time is short.”

CHAPTER XII.

I confess that when we made ready to leave the island on the following morning, I did so with something not unlike regret. Wardy, too, must have felt the same, for he suggested that we take a last look at that stolid image into whose secrets we had blundered. As for the others, Benny seemed glad to go, Ixtual was unfathomable, perhaps imbued with confidence that he would return after we outlanders were banished forever, and Juan was as imperturbable as any mule he ever packed.

We stowed our belongings, now so much smaller in bulk, on the raft and made our way back to the mainland, where without waste of time we recovered our beasts and despite their protests loaded them with their burdens. We took a final look at the esplanade, and headed out into the great highway that, notwithstanding its very gradual rise, was trying and hot and hard as it lay in all its whiteness under the morning sun. The poor burros sweated and panted as with dogged steps they thrust themselves forward upon their absurdly delicate legs while their tiny hoofs clattered on the stone. Higher and higher we climbed. Hotter and hotter shone the sun. The city, drowned by verdure, lost shape beneath us and became a sea of green, the distant island in its lake a mere dot. Memory was invoked to define the details of the great temple in which we had lived; for now it became but a blotch of white piled in tiers. But steadily the great twin peaks grew until at last we halted in the black and yawning opening that like the distended mouth of a dragon waited for us to enter.

“Hadn’t we better make a camp here in one of the guardhouses?” I suggested; but for the first time in our strange adventure Doctor Morgano became the emphatic dictator.

“No, no!” he said and in the same Spanish tongue that I had almost inadvertently used. “We must not. We are still in the land that was once sacred to a great race, and—please let us pass through without halt. No, we shall not rest until we are on the other side. It is more sensible that we stop there than here, before we—let us proceed.”

I saw that Ixtual appeared inordinately grateful to him. I knew it from the strange look in his eyes—a look of great relief and, I think, of reverence. Of this I am certain, that it was Ixtual who shouted to the mules, gave an order to Juan to advance, and then himself ran ahead as if eager to lead us, or compel us to leave that shrine of his ancestors.

So we opened the gateways from that land which we had been the first human beings to enter for centuries, took a final look at all it had disclosed and that we were leaving behind, and plunged into the darkness. I admit that a vague and totally inexplicable sorrow invaded my mind at the thought that I should never see it again.

Once more we emerged from the heart of the mountain and looked out across the great jungle barrier that separated us from men of our times and habits. Once more we installed ourselves in the guardhouses we had occupied while striving to learn the way through the high hills. The tins thrown about that told of provisions used were like reminders of some past period in which we had lived, camped, and eaten as hungry explorers. We made our beds in the same spots. Again, Wardy took out and caressed his rifles, and stared downward at that dense and impenetrable jungle in which crept other black jaguars like the one he had slain and dressed for a trophy.

“By Jove! By Jove!” he muttered to me. “I had forgotten that I came out here for some shooting and—I’d forgotten all about it, I tell you! Funny, isn’t it?”

To tell the truth, I didn’t think it was. I have but little imagination; but living there behind those great, impassable hills in the midst of a deserted city builded by a race long dead had somehow made me forget many old habits and desires, although I felt like an intruder, adventuring into an unknown world when invading it.

“I came after treasure,” I insisted stolidly. “If we find it I shall be quite well satisfied.”

Wardy looked at me curiously.

“I wonder! I wonder if you will,” was all he said as he moved away to give some instructions to Benny. And now, after years, I too wonder, but understand what he meant. It takes time for certain things to force their way through some men’s heads, but in time they usually do. Is that recompense or punishment?

I never learned what the doctor said to Ixtual on the following morning when, rested by a good night in a good camp, we were ready to begin our last exploration. I do know that he called him outside and talked earnestly to him, gesticulating now and then, and evidently overcoming some objection that the taciturn Maya had against us. I shall always believe that Ixtual regretted having guided us, but, having pledged his word, remained true to us, and accepted us. But evidently the doctor influenced the Indian to his own views. Indeed the doctor became suddenly the actual commander of our expedition and evidenced it by his attitude. He said that inasmuch as we had been so long without fresh meat of any kind he thought it wise for Ixtual and Benny to take the rifles and try to kill one of the small deer that were to be found in the foothills, and that Juan must remain behind and guard the animals and the entrance. He next observed that besides an emergency supply of food and water, Wardy and I should carry each an empty pack bag because if anything of archæological interest were found he might ask us to carry them out.

Both Wardy and I understood, from the fact that the doctor spoke in Spanish, that his words were meant for the ears of Ixtual, Juan, and Benny as well as our own, and made no comment. Our little outfit was made up, and we entered the great secret way after closing its stone gate behind us.

We had walked some distance before the doctor stopped and, as if apologizing for having assumed an air of authority, said: “It was necessary, more than you two dream, perhaps, to keep from the others, and especially Ixtual, the knowledge that we are now seeking treasure. I have never told you my full impressions of the Maya Indians through whose settlements we must pass before the coast can be reached; but of this be sure: Our lives would not be worth a centime if they knew that we had either found treasure, sought treasure, or carried treasure with us from here.”

“You had to take some sort of outlandish oaths that time Ixtual took you away to——” I began interrogatively, and he silenced me.

“You must ask no questions concerning that night, my friend, either now or ever. I did pledge myself.” There was dry emphasis on the pronoun. “But—neither of you were compelled to take an oath. I pledged myself in your behalf and am answerable for your conduct. Further than that I can answer nothing. Evasion, you may call it, but not exactly a perjury. The scientific results, however, would have justified, in my conscience, even the latter. But this remember for the sake of our lives, that no one must know that we have sought treasure. You have been with me merely as assistants in a great research which I was permitted to undertake because the superstition of an all-but-dead race made it see in me a new messiah and—but I forget! I can speak no more,” he concluded with an unmistakable show of mental harassment, which Wardy and I respected. “Come!” said the doctor, and again plunged ahead.

We came to the point where the secret roadway was cut by the opening through which Wardy and I bad first entered it from beneath when in considerable more distress of mind than now, and through it Morgano turned.

“This will merely lead us down to that hole beneath the shelf of rock where I first landed; the place above the chasm,” I said, thinking that our leader might have made a mistake.

“I know,” he replied quietly, still advancing. “We must go to that very spot.”

We came to it at last and turned to the place where the two flights of steps branched upward, each, as we had learned, leading to the great stone pillars that had once supported the suspended bridge, and stopped.

“This must be the place,” he said, and took from his pocket a leaf torn from his notebook which he consulted under the light of his torch. He read it slowly to himself, and then flared his light about him as if his eyes were seeking some certain mark.

“Ah,” he said softly, “this is it!” and pointed at a small tablet apparently carved into the face of the living rock. “According to the key tablets in the temple it required the presence and efforts of three high priests to either enter or emerge from the secret passages leading downward.”

“Admirable plan!” said Wardy. “Kept any one man from looting the company vaults. Sort of a safe-deposit system, eh? Shows they didn’t thoroughly trust one another when it was built.”

“Perhaps,” was all the response the doctor made regarding that particular, and again consulted his paper as if to make certain that he had made no mistake. “Hallewell, you go up the right-hand flight of steps and stand on the fifth from the bottom. Wardrop, you go up the left-hand flight and stand on the seventh from the bottom. Neither of you must leave there until I call. Now, we shall see if my interpretation was correct.”

I felt the stone give slightly beneath my feet, and would have leaped from it had it lowered an inch more, but was restrained from removing my weight by the thought that past experience of antique mechanisms had invariably proved that they were based on counterbalances. Wardy afterward told me that his experience and thoughts were the same. Beneath us, where Doctor Morgano was stationed, we heard a dull, grating noise, as of long-unused levers shitting, then there was a sharp click, and his voice called us downward. The apex containing the tablet, that mass of seemingly undisturbed and natural rock in place, a mass that must have weighed many tons, had shifted upward, exposing an opening fully the size of an ordinary commodious doorway. Steps led downward from it and on either side was a huge chambered recess filled with great levers and carefully adjusted weights, some of which swung slightly like great pendulums barely disturbed. Beams of stone that in themselves weighed many hundredweight crossed in intricate but orderly array, all designed by some ancient master engineer who must have been a genius of equilibration.

Before venturing farther Wardy asked: “Hadn’t we better make certain that we can get out by blocking this door open?”

“I doubt if it could be done with anything at hand,” replied the doctor, “and, furthermore, I think I have correctly interpreted the directions for opening it if it did close. No, I think we can safely risk its remaining open. Come, let us go downward.”

We descended at least a hundred steps, then entered a natural rift or cavern that steeply inclined for a considerable distance the foot of this incline we came to a tunnel made by man, a second flight of a hundred steps, then to another turning that led into a second cleft whose floor was steeply inclined for a considerable distance before it reached a level where the character of the walls on one side altered. It was as if there had originally been an arched groove made by nature that had on its outer, or open side, been walled in with enormous blocks of carefully cut stone. It ran nearly a half circle and was ventilated by narrow slits. Looking into these with our electric torches we saw that the wall must have been at least ten feet in thickness, and we surmised that on the other side was the floor of the chasm, fully four hundred feet below the place where the bridge had been suspended.

Another door barred our way, but it was left half open. We wondered why, for it also was supplied with a locking mechanism. We pulled it open without difficulty, entered, and paused in astonishment.

We stood in a great chamber whose floor, sides, and arched roofs were actually made of bricks of gold, shining dully and reflecting the rays of our electric torches. In the center of this chamber, seated in state, was an exact replica in gold of the god Icopan, resting, as did the god of the temple, with its hands on its knees and its head bent slightly forward as if scrutinizing any who entered. The sole difference was that this image was but fifteen feet in height, and its eyes and ornaments were of roughly cut gems. Yet its eyes, a pair of rose-cut diamonds of large size, flashed reflections from the light of our torches and here again the effect was malignant, or accusing, as one might imagine. Wardy and I had been staring upward as if fascinated by those eyes, when we heard the doctor’s voice.

“This explains why the door was left open,” he said, and we saw that he was stopping above something at the foot of the statue.

We advanced to his side and saw that, chained with a chain of gold that had evidently been welded about its waist was the skeleton of a man. Engraved deeply into a tablet attached to the chain was the record of the man’s misdeed, which the doctor was deciphering.

“It gives the man’s name and the date when he was brought here for punishment,” he said, then paused and read some more and again spoke aloud. “He was one of the keepers of the treasure, and this temple, and evidently betrayed his trust, for the last sentence is: “Here, chained to the feet of the great god Icopan, with food and water for but one period of the moon, he is left to meditate over his sacrilegious sin of theft.’”

“Ugh! Nice sort of death,” said Wardy. “Probably the poor devil couldn’t stand association with so much wealth without wanting some of it. But why the open door?”

“To prevent him from smothering to death. This place is doutbless airtight. Moreover, this date is important, as it is—let me think—ummmh—it would be just about three months before the last priest died of the plague there in the Great Temple, and they were too occupied with death to ever return and lock the door to this place.”

I’m not, as I have said, at all imaginative, but I stood there for a moment trying to conjecture this poor wretch’s temptations, crime, and slow and suffering end. I could fancy his being in a panic of fear when on every hand the Mayas, young and old, were dropping dead, preparations for deserting the Sacred City under way, and some opportunity thrusting itself upon him for at least providing for his own future in case he, too, fled with the others. Alone he probably could never regain entrance to this underground storehouse, being but a sharer of the secret and but part possessor thereof. What had he stolen? It could not have been gold, for that would have been too heavy to carry, and again it was probably of far less value to the ancient Maya that jewels, which must have been rare. It stimulated my thoughts in a new direction.

“We might dig out this idol’s eyes and that necklace he has set in his chest, and get away with at least a few bricks,” I said, determined that I would not leave that entire store of wealth behind and go forth empty handed. “What do you suggest, doctor?” I asked, turning my light toward the savant.

He was leaning against the base of the image and, with his electric torch held under his arm, studying his notebook. He did not immediately answer, but now turned and walked to the door. He bent over and counted the rows of golden tile from the bottom upward until his hand stopped at the twelfth row. Then he carefully counted along that until he had reached what must have been about the thirtieth in that line, and putting the heel of his hand against it threw his weight forward. Nothing happened. By the light of his torch I could see that he was nonplused.

“It should move,” he said. “Perhaps I counted incorrectly.”

Again he repeated his count, beginning at the door, and again he achieved no result. He pressed all the surrounding bricks, while Wardy and I stood solicitously behind him. He again consulted his notes and said: “Twelfth row from the bottom, the thirtieth from the door on the side of the sun. That would mean the left-hand side according to the Maya term. Perhaps it’s the opposite side in this case.”

Hopefully we went to the opposite side and repeated the performance, and again accomplished nothing.

“Dear me!” said the doctor, suddenly sitting down on the lower step of the pedestal bearing the image, and removing his hat and scratching his head, while Wardy proceeded phlegmatically to trim the wick of the lantern he carried. “Dear me! I must have been careless in copying the tablet up in the head of the great effigy, or else careless in copying down the translation from my memoranda. You see—I was so much more interested in the other tablets than in those pertaining to treasure that I—— How stupid of me!”

CHAPTER XIII.

What I could have said at that moment could scarcely be written or spoken by any one with a regard for the proprieties. And all I could have said would have been inadequate through lack of vocabulary. I stood there too heavily charged to speak a single word. Wardy broke the spell by a roar of inordinate laughter.

“Well,” said I hopefully, “if the worst comes to worst, we can go back to the island temple and get it correctly, can’t we?”

“I—I—I daren’t take you back!” exclaimed the doctor helplessly. “Ixtual would desert, rally his people, and we should all be killed! You don’t know how difficult it was to—to——”

There was something so pitiable in his dejection, and disappointment, and self-accusation that I hadn’t the heart to be angry with him.

“I wouldn’t care for myself,” he blurted, “but I promised you two men that I would do my best to see that you were reimbursed, and, but for your help, I could never have come here! And I am afraid that you, Hallewell, spent all you had, and—damn it!—I hoped to make you rich because you have been so decent, and kind, and considerate to me! Now I have bungled the whole affair and you will——”

“Don’t you mind it at all, old chap!” I interrupted. “You did your best. It isn’t your fault it all. Besides, we can get enough out of here, without attracting any attention at all, to more than pay the expenses of all of us and—I think I ought to climb up and dig out this thing’s eyes. They look like diamonds to me. But if they’re only cut crystals, we can at least get away with a few gold bricks, and mind you, a hundredweight of gold is worth about twenty thousand dollars. So we shall play even, or better, anyhow.”

“And you don’t need to worry about my part of it at all,” declared Wardy generously. “I’ve got enough to get along as it is without an ounce of gold from here. Not too much, but enough. Besides—I did get some shooting, after all! That black jaguar’s pelt is very rare. Very rare! Now for his eyes, Hallewell. Dig ’em out, and if they prove to be diamonds, they can be recut and—— Here, if I climb up on the top step could you stand on my shoulders and reach them?”

And then there happened something that I have never clearly understood. Doctor Morgano laid beseeching hands oh our arms and implored us to give him one more chance.

“It is desecration!” he declared. “It is, in its way, a sacrilege! Don’t do it—yet! It mustn’t be done until all other measures have failed. Let me try again. I am positive that there is another chamber somewhere. The glyphs told me so. I tell you that there is something here that hurts at the thought of your proposed action!” And he thumped his heart with both hands as if to emphasize his appeal.

It all seemed very foolish, but both Wardy and I, after one interchanged look, acceded to Morgano’s wish. He fell to making other counts and other pressures. One after another failed, then we all tried.

“It’s a certain tablet of gold that must be pressed,” said the doctor desperately. “Of that I am positive. That was invariably their construction for secret locking devices. Just one tablet in this case.”

“Then suppose we do it methodically,” I suggested. “Let’s start at the bottom row and press each one completely around the room.”

“That should get it sooner or later,” agreed Wardy, and now we fell to work, one behind the other, I on my knees attacking the lower layer, Wardy on his testing the next, and the doctor following in similar bent posture. It was back-breaking and tedious work. The chamber was inordinately large under such measurements. We were glad when we were able to stand on our feet, but the heels of my palms were getting sore and bruised by the continued thrusting of my weight against them. Hours of the unending count and pressure, and movement went on, and we were glad to stop for luncheon. We sat on the lower step and ate from our tins of sardines and drank water, and said but little. Wearily we resumed our task, like laborers whose muscles are overfatigued by protracted, physical effort. Long before this we had laid our electric torches aside and depended solely upon the light of the lantern and our sense of feeling in that gloomy chamber. We had made the complete round of that circular chamber so many times that I was rendered giddy by trying to recall the count. We had worked from our knees upward to a crouching position on our feet, then to one of less restraint, and then to rounds where we had stood erect. Now we reached upward for round after round and our bruised palms were a source of more thought than anything else, and then we came to a time where, owing to his short stature, the doctor could no longer reach and press. Wardy and I continued alone. The packs were under my feet in the last round I made, and then for a time the giant alone laboriously counted and pressed while the doctor and I, seated on the lower step, watched him. He got to the limit of his reach and now in turn he stood upon the folded packs.

Long before this we had all fallen to silence. So the place was very still when he said, with characteristic lack of exuberance: “Here it is. I’ve got it, I think. Thirty-second from the bottom. Fifty-eighth from the end. The doctor made a mistake; but—it gives! By Jove, it gives! Here goes!”

And he put both bruised hands against the slab of gold and thrust his full weight forward. The savant and I were on our feet, eager with expectance. We had seized our electric torches and the place was now bright with light. A whole section of golden brick, regularly outlined in jagged detail, swung inward, slowly, ponderously, and stopped, exposing an opening leading into another blackness beyond. All three of us rushed toward it and through it. We had entered the treasure house of a race.

A great cavern opened before us. Tier on tier in huge squares and slabs, like mere pigs of iron, ingots ot gold were stacked about us. Stacked higher than our fingers might reach. We could not compute their depths, for they were as computable from where we stood as rows of wood in a wood vender’s warehouse. Unconvinced by sight, we rushed forward and felt them to assure ourselves by the sense of touch that all was real in this dull-yellow amassment of metal. Each bore its stamp—a mere glyph, as the doctor told us, testifying the name of the minter and the weight of the bar. Likewise each bore the impress of a stamp in the likeness of the god whom the Maya nation worshiped, as if to say “his gold.”

We halted, standing together as if for companionship, we three in the center of the great treasure vault, and flashing our torches here and there like three men in the center of a great wine cellar of old striving to appraise the depth of our visible surroundings.

“Good Lord! What a lot of it!” exclaimed Wardy in a strangely subdued voice. “Enough to upset the world.”

“The accumulation of an entire people, an entire race, for centuries,” said the archæologist, his voice sounding awed and hushed.

“But something we can’t carry out under surrounding conditions,” I added hopelessly. “The biggest store of gold in the world, and quite useless to us! Is that another doorway through there?”

I had discovered that down at the far end of this treasure vault was another narrow, black slit.

We moved toward it, still for some unaccountable reason keeping close together as if for mutual protection against that golden god outside whom we were defying. We entered a smaller chamber where again were great slabs of metal which we inspected.

“This is silver, I think,” said Wardy, after scratching one with his penknife. “Strange that there’s so little of it compared with the gold!”

“Silver was a more precious metal than gold to the Maya,” said the doctor. “It was by far the rarest of the two metals to them. There’s another chamber beyond this, I think. Isn’t that a doorway at the end?”

Again we advanced like three conspirators and again we entered another chamber. So complex and yet so defined is the human estimate of valuation that for a moment we stood disappointed when we saw no tiers of metal; nothing but rows of square stone caskets. The doctor rushed to one of these, stopped, flashed his light, and shouted, almost exultantly: “These are sarcophagi! The tombs of generations of dynasties and in the very burial chamber of those who ruled for thousands and thousands of years. The discoveries in Egypt are nothing at all by comparison. I know it! Each one has his tablet telling the history of his reign, I am fairly certain.”

In an ecstasy of discovery he dropped his torch from his trembling fingers and its glass trinkled in fragments on that ancient floor. He did not seem aware of his loss. He rhapsodized in a voice that was shrill and high, a voice that screamed and rebounded from the walls above as it was thrown back upon our ears.

“Egypt? Egypt was young—perhaps unknown—when these kings were brought to rest in this place! The blank history of civilization—of the globe—is here before us. We have opened the gates of missing knowledge! If there ever existed an Atlantis here is the proof. If civilization advanced eastward instead of westward, now we may know. If the fabled Garden of Eden, where the human race began to lift its intelligence above that of mere beasts, ever was, here we may find proof of its location. Tablets! Glyphs! On each sarcophagus. Records in imperishable stone.”

Wardy and I saw that he was staring at what was undoubtedly a mummy in a sitting posture, swathed, wrapped, dried, and hideous.

“If there’s another chamber beyond this,” whispered Wardy, “we ought to be going into it. I’m not and never have been fond of graveyards of this sort. Shall we drag him on, or go back?”

“Let’s see it through,” I protested, and we led rather than seduced the doctor forward in our unusual enterprise.

It was again easy. No door with ingenious secret mechanism barred our way. Indeed, there was no door at all, but merely an opening leading to the final chamber of this series of sacred Maya vaults. We saw that it was nearly square, small by comparison with those we had traversed, and that its floor was covered with small stone chests, each in an exact place, each with its carefully carved stone lid, each sealed with some royal emblem.

“Well, here goes!” said Wardy, as he laid his fingers on the first and gave a herculean tug that brought the lid away.

We craned our necks forward, Wardy from sheer curiosity, and I in the hope of finding portable treasure. All that we saw was merely a collection of plain golden cups with a figure of the god worked thereon in silver.

“What? What is it? What have you found?” cried the doctor, rushing to us and picking up the larger cup. “Was there no inscription anywhere?”

“On the lid, I think,” replied Wardy, turning it over for the doctor’s inspection, and the latter fell on his knees before it.

“Very interesting,” he said with enthusiasm. “Very interesting, indeed. This was a ceremonial service used by a certain high priest of the temple during his life, thereby rendered sacred, and unused by any of his followers. What is in these other caskets?”

He went to the next and read the hieroglyphics on the lid.

“This contains the service used by his predecessor,” he said, and when Wardy pulled off this top there was another and even less pretentious set of cups. We went from one to another, Wardy opening each in turn by the savant’s request, and all the time my spirits and hopes were falling like mercury influenced by a blizzard. It began to seem that the great treasure of the Mayas consisted solely of gold and silver, all of which, under the circumstances, was about as useless to me as so much lead. We made the entire round without finding other than similar services in the caskets. We examined the walls of the chamber, seeking other doors, and convinced ourselves there was none. Finally we returned to the other chamber, or temple, and I stood staring upward at the sole jewels we had discovered, those in the eyes and on the breast, of the image.

“It seems a pity,” said the doctor as if he had read my thoughts. “It is like sacrilege to injure such a priceless antiquity!” He spoke with such profound sadness that I knew he would never be reconciled to my vandalism, although he might submit to it, knowing my financial needs.

“It does that,” agreed Wardy, readjusting his monocle and standing on tiptoes to better view the head of the image above him. Suddenly he exclaimed: “Look! If I’m not mistaken the pavement at the base of his nobs here is identical, but on a smaller scale than that one we went for at the foot of the big stone chap over on the island.”

The doctor, as if imbued with a great hope, fairly jumped forward.

“You are right! You are right! It is!” he exclaimed, and, brushing us aside, stepped onto the pavement and began to move his feet over the pattern. He hesitated, and then soliloquized: “The ixton sign was one we stepped on, and the lower sector of the Acona and“” He bent over and closely studied the pavement, and then muttered: “Ah, here they are! Not quite in the same positions as those in the Great Temple. We will try them.”

Both Wardy and I leaned forward in a state bordering on suspense as the savant carefully planted his feet on two marks and rested his weight on them. They gave slightly, and we heard a noise that sounded as if it came from the back of the image. I ran hastily around it, but to my extreme disappointment discovered nothing. The doctor left his place and joined me. Wardy sauntered after him, and we stood there turning our lights upon the walls. They were unchanged.

“Something must have gone wrong with it—and yet the characters moved under my feet,” insisted the doctor.

“And I was certain I heard a noise of some sort behind here,” Wardy insisted. “Let me step on them. Perhaps your weight was not sufficient.”

He put his suggestion into execution; but the stones did not move farther, nor did they recede to place. There was no further noise.

“Well, all we can do is to return here with axes and demolish this pavement and learn what’s gone wrong,” I said desperately and at the same time remembering how short we were of food, the difficulties that might ensue through Ixtual’s superstition, and a dozen other annoyances to be met.

“It seems so,” said the savant with greater dejection than ever. “But at least let us consider that before picking the stones out of this marvelous effigy. If I can but influence Ixtual——” And I knew then that he, too, had thought of the dangers of our position. Then he brightened as if all thought of treasure had vanished, and after raving about the lids of the stone caskets in the inner vault, pleaded with us to give him time to make quick notes from those lids before departing.

“Think of it,” he said, “we have opened a full and complete treasure house of history. What matters it if we find nothing more than that and——”

Wardy looked at me and shrugged his huge shoulders.

“Well, if you wish to make notes, I think you should begin quickly. The oil in the lantern won’t last forever, and in addition we shall probably exhaust our batteries before we reach camp again. I doubt if we have more than half an hour to spare for further notes. Let’s get at it!”

And then with a shout that echoed and reëchoed throughout those grimly silent chambers, Doctor Morgano began running forward toward the rear wall of the inner vault. Running behind him we saw that a narrow door that had been so adeptly concealed as to defy detection, had swung inward, exposing another chamber. We hastily pushed it farther open, and an astonishing sight met our eyes.

One side of this long, narrow chamber was hung with royal or priestly vestments that had been there through all the ages in this hermetically sealed wardrobe, and these, bit by bit, were crumbling into dust and falling, leaving nothing but their masses of metallic embroideries; withering away before our eyes under the invisible touch of the air. The doctor brushed his hat off, clutched his hair with frantic fingers, and broke into a stream of invective.

“Oh, that I might have got here in time to see them. The priceless vestments! All that was needed to complete our knowledge of the very garments they wore! Dust—dust—crumbling to dust they are.”

I think that Wardy feared our companion might lose his reason, for now he put his hand on the doctor’s shoulder and said soothingly: “But it’s not as bad as it might have been. Man, you had a chance to see approximately how they were shaped and what they looked like! Between us we can make pretty fair drawings of them from memory. Of course you’ll not be able to reproduce details, which I suppose is a pity; but you got some of the outlines, didn’t you?”

The doctor ceased his lamentations but said regretfully: “That is true! But think how much more I could have seen had I been here on the instant the door opened and the free air began to enter. It’s a pity! Almost a calamity that I, who am now the greatest living authority on Maya history and customs, could not have seen these also.”

But my interest in vestments had been of scant duration and my eyes were scanning the room. I pushed past my companions and across it to the end, for there I had seen what looked like a stone door in the wall, covered with seals. Before the doctor could see what I was doing and utter one of his interminable protests, I caught the stone handle and jerked violently. A door opened, exposing a cabinet, and it was my turn to shout with exultation. Under the white light of my electric torch there glittered and scintillated in infinite variety of flashing color—the collected jewels of the Maya treasury! Undreamed-of riches lay beneath my hands. They lay in great and orderly array, as if deposited there in those past dead centuries by trained, careful, and reverent hands. Great girdles and crowns, bracelets and anklets, chains of state and priestly scepters fashioned at the tops like rays of the sun—all the priestly paraphernalia that had lent the glory of pomp and display to the long lines of autocrats who in those far-off days had ruled the destinies of that ancient civilization. Heavily and crudely fashioned, but seeming in its very solidity an expression of power and undisputed sway, the collection lay there ready for the touch of human hands after ages of rest.

“Great Scott!” muttered Wardy. “I’ve seen several lots of crown jewels, but this is more worth looking at than any of them!” He ended with a long-drawn whistle.

The doctor appeared speechless and acted as if apprehensive lest these, too, might crumble like the robes on the wall.

I bent forward and looked at a shelf beneath and there beheld unmounted gems, diamonds undoubtedly. Beneath that was still another containing a miscellaneous collection of rubies, emeralds, sapphires, and opals. Carefully we took them out and spread them on the floor. An appraisement disclosed the fact that the ancients had very primitive ideas of cutting facets, but nearly all the stones were of sufficient size to bear recutting by modern methods. There were but two very large diamonds, but all were of that singular blue-white quality which were for so many years mined in Brazil. None of us was expert in jewels, but any of us had sufficient knowledge to know that the unmounted gems alone represented a fortune, measured by even modern standards of wealth.

“Those,” said the doctor, pointing at the unmounted stones, “we can, of course, take; but it is an outrage if these others are ever broken up. Such destruction of incomparable specimens of ancient handiwork would be nothing less than abominable!”

“In any event we must hurry out of this!” exclaimed Wardy. “The lantern is beginning to flicker. Wish we could have found a tin of oil.”

I hastily tore one of the bags to shreds and wrapped the mounted jewels in them lest they get marred by rubbing, and placed them in a bag, then collected all the uncut stones into the other, protecting the larger ones as best I could in separate wrappings. We hastily closed the cabinet door, went outside, and pushed the door leading into the treasure chamber shut and heard a dull snap.

“One could never by accident guess that it was there,” said Wardy, taking a last glance at it, and then we moved rapidly outward into the temple. The god glared at me as if angry that I had ever contemplated robbing him of his eyes. We saw that the stones that operated the secret door behind had resumed their places in the pavement. And then we almost ran from the chamber, stumbling through the long passages and panting up the flights of stairs with but one torch to light our way. One battery gave out, and then the other. We stopped and inserted the only spare one we had to restore the dimming light, and hastened ahead. It was defective and began to flare yellow before we reached the great levers opening the outer door. It expired just as Wardy found the end of the huge beam and threw his weight upon it, and for a trembling moment we were in darkness. Then the door slowly opened and we looked out to discover that the sun had set and we were in the twilight of the outer world.

CHAPTER XIV.

I cannot look back on the days that followed our find of the Maya treasure without a mental shudder. It was as if the gods had put a curse upon us that was executed by nature herself. We started at dawn and had not reached the first edge of the jungle before one of the pack mules was bitten by a snake so venomous that within an hour the poor beast died despite all our efforts to save it. A case of tinned meats upon which we had depended for at least half rations, was found to have been spoiled by the heat and had to be thrown away. The game that we knew must exist in the jungle fled from us as if from a scourge, and not even the monkeys came within rifle shot. The very birds seemed to fly beyond gun range.

Twice we lost our way, once so seriously that we found ourselves in the borders of a swamp we could not cross, and had to retrace our steps through that steaming pestilential jungle behind, where we were tortured by venomous insects, and in constant fear of deadly snakes. We were lost for an entire day before we found the blazings of the trail we had made when entering, and the trail itself had become overgrown and tangled again with that marvelous and malignant rapidity which nothing save such a jungle can manifest. It was as if the jungle itself had become a huge enveloping serpent leisurely enfolding us, certain of crushing us in its embrace and leering at our puny, frantic efforts to escape. For unending hours at a stretch we struggled onward in silence, speaking never a word, irritable, weak, desperate. Sometimes thirst was added to our sufferings and starvation was ever gnawing us with sharpened fangs. A pony fell and could not rise, and had to be put out of its misery: A second pack burro succumbed through weakness, fell across a log, broke its leg, and had to be shot. Long before this we had abandoned every spare ounce of weight, and I shall not forget Wardy’s sigh when he considered which weapon he would keep, hesitated between a sporting rifle and a beautiful Gruener gun, chose the former, and left his prized gun case standing against a tree beside the trail.

“Good-by, old friends,” he murmured. “You have been with me through Africa, India, Ceylon, and around the world, but now we part!” And then, as if he could not bear a second’s delay, trudged ahead without a single backward look.

I began to be tortured by hallucinations. I could not sleep, save fitfully, and my rest was then broken by nightmares. I fancied that Ixtual had somehow discovered that we carried treasure in the packs upon our backs, and was becoming murderous. I’m not certain but that he did in reality suspect something after all! Benny began to croon in Arabic interminable and melancholy songs of the desert. The doctor took to muttering strange gibberish about glyphs, talking monotonously in a dead undertone for hours at a stretch. Only Juan, unimaginative, stolid, perhaps hardened to starvation, plodded doggedly on without ever a murmur of complaint or sign of wavering sanity.

And so, at last, ragged, staggering scarecrows of men, with scarred and scratched skeleton beasts, we emerged from that horrible jungle that seemed sullen and angry because we had escaped. I cannot to this day look at a brilliant orchid without hating it for the memories of those million orchids sometimes screening snakes that we saw in that hellish belt through which we survived.

There, almost within sight of a native farm, Ixtual added to our torture by obstinately, almost angrily insisting that we must take cover until nightfall, and add more miles to our travel before appealing to any one for succor. Wardy and I sought to influence him against his decision. Benny cursed him in frenzied, murderous Arabic, and the little doctor appealed and implored him; but he remained steadfastly obdurate and inflexible.

“The señores do not understand!” he said to me in hoarse, dry-throated Spanish. “We must not be seen here! We must not! Is it well to die after all we have endured, rather than be safe by suffering but a few hours more? Is it just to me to have been your friend and servant that I be killed for my follies of faithfulness?”

“Not by a damned sight!” croaked Wardy. “What say you, Hallewell? I vote we stick it out and do as Ixtual says.”

“And so do I,” I agreed; but Heaven only knows what that exertion of my last remaining resolution cost me; for I was at my limit of fortitude and did not care much whether I lived or died.

We lay, sweltering and weak, in cover for the three hours intervening between daylight and close darkness, and then wearily dragged ourselves onward again until nearly midnight, when we came to a clearing where we found a well; also a hut filled with maize with which we fed our starved animals, and ourselves munched with them. And so remarkable is human vitality that when we moved forward after two hours’ rest, life had begun to resume its strength. We were still in a land of unknown and perhaps deadly perils, practically unarmed, and yet no longer afraid. Our progress through unfrequented yet very passable roads was far more steady and rapid. We put miles behind us, rather than tens of yards as had been the case but a day previous. The packs on our backs, while still heavy, no longer felt unendurable. At dawn Ixtual led us to a place where he said we must camp, and himself disappeared. Within an hour he returned with food that was like the sweets of Paradise to our famished bodies, and after that wonderful meal we slept.

We crawled out and went to a pail of water thoughtfully provided by Juan, who grinned cheerfully and gave us his polite, “Buenos dias, señores,” as he began preparations for the evening meal.

“Where are Ixtual and Doctor Morgano?” I asked him.

“They have been gone more than three hours. Whither, I know not,” he answered with no sign of interest. “That Indian, Ixtual—who is but a bad Catholic—may the Holy Mother have pity on him in purgatory!—awoke the great doctor and whispered something to him. I am a light sleeper and was disturbed. Then the doctor got up quietly, as if to avoid awakening you other señores, and together they left, like this.” And he mimicked a man walking cautiously on tiptoes.

“Oh, there they are! Seem to have a lot to talk about.”

They came slowly through the old roadway, stopping now and then as if involved in some discussion; but even then I noted a peculiar difference in Ixtual’s attitude toward the doctor that was unusually marked.

By gradual stages we made our way back to the coast, Wardy, the doctor, and I taking turns in keeping jealous guard over the treasure we had won from the subterranean chambers beneath the sacred peaks. And Wardy and I when alone on the long trails frequently spoke of the chamber filled with gold that was corded up in tiers—the gold we had left behind. And there on the coast we stopped in the hotel waiting for the steamer that would take us northward to New Orleans.

We had presented Juan with the animals that had suffered with us, knowing that he would care for them.

Ixtual puzzled us somewhat by his behavior, and with great dignity declined a peso more than the wage he had stipulated. I am not certain that we were sorry to part with him. No, I qualify that by saying that in some ways I was; for I respected him as being something vastly above the peons of that country, or any native I ever met. We carried our belongings aboard the steamer and locked them in our staterooms, and felt that our great adventure had come to its close.

The little steamship was to sail in the early hours of the morning. She seemed clean and elegant to us after all we had endured. It was like entering into the heart of luxury once more. Only Doctor Morgano seemed silent and absorbed on that evening when, after dinner, we sat on the after deck beneath the awnings with the electric lights shining dully on the table where again we could have long-forgotten drinks and idly stir the cracked ice in the tall glasses. Off on the shore we could see the lamps of the town. Under the lights of the wharf the stevedores were bringing aboard the last of the cargo. A dark, lithe figure flitted across the wharf, stared at us for a moment, and sauntered slowly shoreward.

“Ixtual, as surely as I’m alive!” exclaimed Wardy, half rising from his chair and peering at the retreating shape. “Well, here’s luck to him, even if he was a rum sort!”

But I noticed that the doctor seemed unaware of our toast and still sat hunched up in his deck chair with his legs sprawled before him and his hands in his pockets, his chin on his breast and his eyes fixed absently toward the west as if still visioning all the great secrets he had so regretfully left behind. He was in the same mood when we bade one another good night and separated for our cabins.

I was but vaguely disturbed when the steamer sailed, and heard the mellow notes of the ship’s bell telling me that it was two o’clock in the morning. Lulled by the slow, cradling swing of the open sea, I slept heavily, delightfully, dreamlessly, and awoke with a sense of profound well-being. Through the thin deal partition I could hear Wardy singing as he made his morning toilet, and Benny’s voice in English: “I have gotten out your white linen suit, sair.” I was the first at breakfast and had nearly finished when Wardy entered, breezy, fresh, and well groomed.

“Where’s our little encyclopedia?” he asked. “Hope he’s not found more of those blamed glyphs. I’m going to decoy him to the engine room and see if he can read the manufacturers’ names on the engines. Ha!”

One of the stewards came in and said: “Pardon, gentlemen; but which of you is Mr. Hallewell? I have a note for him.”

My dear Hallwell—and Wardrop—for this letter is for you both. Much as I regret parting from you with no more formal and customary leave-taking than this, I think it best; for did you know of my purpose, you would both endeavor to dissuade me—uselessly so, I may add. But the truth is that I, a scientist, cannot bear to leave such a promising field for research as we have together visited without further and possibly prolonged study of it and its peculiarities. Its possibilities are of a magnitude that neither of you who are but slightly interested in archæology or the dead histories of nations can comprehend. To me these are the sole pleasures in life. I cannot withstand the temptation. I should be unhappy ever until I returned. I should far rather commit suicide than let such marvelous opportunities go by as are now offered me through certain understandings, which I am not permitted to explain, arrived at between the remnants of the Maya race and myself. I owe an eternal debt of gratitude to that hereditary high priest of his tribe, Ixtual, with whom by an interchange of sacred rites and ceremonies I have become a blood brother with the rank of priesthood in the Maya race, of which I have become an adopted and fully accepted member. I am no longer Italian. I am Maya henceforth. I entreat you by the memories of a friendship which I shall always fondly cherish not to betray the secrets which we have learned together to any living man. I implore you to make no effort to find, or to recall me; for I shall be safe, honored, and happy in that environment which I have chosen. If not asking too much of your friendship, will you please pay my room rent in Paris for five years, see that safer locks are put on the door, and leave the keys with the custodian at the Assyrian Exploration Society’s offices. I ask no share in the proceeds from the sale of the jewels you have, and desire nothing from it. I shall have no need of it. Furthermore, although its fulfillment is uncertain and perhaps may never be, I wish that sometime I may see you both again when I can find time for a vacation from the great, noble, and distinguished task which I, undoubtedly the most widely and best informed archæologist of this century, have undertaken for the sheer love of knowledge.

Again regretting that circumstances made it wise for me to forego a personal good-by, I am, ever your devoted friend, ⁠Paolo Morgano.

P. S.—I am taking all the sacred jewels with me, for to break them up would be sacrilege unspeakable, and irreparable.”

We were so astounded by this communication that for a full moment we sat with our mouths open and eyes equally wide, staring at each other, then as if actuated by a single motor center we hurried to the doctor’s cabin. It was in a peculiar state of confusion. Thrown carelessly on the floor were all his spare shirts, linen, underwear, and clothing, and his sole piece of luggage, a suit case, was missing. A worn, stained, slightly frayed canvas sack lying limp and empty on the floor told the tale. He had emptied out his suit case and thrown away such mere superfluities as changes of linen and underwear and placed the crown jewels of the Maya tribe therein.

Wardy and I again stared at each other and then, despite the loss of the loot and our estimable and beloved partner, burst into laughter.

“I’m at least glad that you and I acted as custodians for the unmounted stones, Wardy,” I said.

He picked up from the floor the rusty old sack that had for so many days contained wealth sufficient to ransom a prince and now felt inside it tentatively. He found down in one corner a wad of torn canvas, unrolled it, and disclosed a single ring mounting a unique seal cut in some semiprecious stone. He slipped it on one of his fingers as if to test its size, learned that it fitted, and then said, quite cheerfully and with his habitual generosity:

“If you don’t mind, old man, I’ll keep this. If you will pay back the thousand pounds I advanced for Juan, and give Beni Hassan a similar amount, all the rest is yours. I’ve all the money I can ever use, without it. The dear old doctor has his. And I fancy the sale of the other stuff will provide more than you can ever use.”

And despite my protests it was thus settled, and as far as the final profit was concerned, his prediction proved true.

We went out to the deck, where we learned from the chief officer that Doctor Morgano had quietly informed him at midnight that he had decided not to sail with us, and had gone down the gangway, where he was met by one the mate believed to be an Indian servant, to whom the doctor handed the suit case to carry, and that they had leisurely walked from sight, talking in some strangely barbaric tongue.

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 Metasyntactic variable, which is released under the 
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