All being thus in readiness for our advance, we went down the stair-way beneath the swinging statue, and from beneath pulled out the piece of rock which propped up the great mass of stone. With a heavy jar it fell and closed the passage-way, and we prepared to start. Just then Fray Antonio remembered that he had left on a ledge in the cave—that we had used as a shelf for the storage of various small matters during our sojourn there—a little volume that he dearly loved: the Meditations of Thomas a Kempis. He was full of remorse for his forgetfulness, and did not ask that we should turn back to get his book for him; yet his distress over the loss of it was so evident that we had not the heart to go on.

"It will take only ten minutes to go back," said Rayburn, and as he spoke he ran up the stair-way and set his shoulders to sway up the stone. In a moment he called: "Just come here, Young, and help, will you? It don't work as easily from this side." But even with Young's help the stone did not move. Then the rest of us joined these two, and all five of us together pushed with all our strength—and the stone did not yield by so much as the breadth of a hair! And then rather a queer look came into Rayburn's face, and he said: "I think that I understand what is the matter. The point of leverage falls beyond the edge of the hole. From where we have a chance to push, we are working against the whole weight of the stone. We might as well try to lift the mountain itself!" And then he added, "I guess we'd better give this thing up and start."

Very curious feelings were in our breasts as we picked up our packs and set off along the canon; for we knew that by that way only could we go, and that, no matter what was ahead of us, our retreat was cut off.



XI.

THE SUBMERGED CITY.

A sweet, warm wind blew in our faces as we set off along the canon; the sun shone joyously upon us, and there was that fresh, tingling quality in the air that is peculiar to regions high above the level of the sea. In spite of the fact that the way behind us was irrevocably barred, and that no matter what dangers were ahead of us we had no option but to face them, our spirits were strong within us, and we went blithely on our way. Young, who was in advance, began to whistle "Yankee Doodle"; and presently, from the rear of our procession, where Pablo walked beside the heavily laden El Sabio, there broke forth a mouth-organ accompaniment to this spirited melody.

The bed of the canon, through which a little stream ran, fell away before us along a slight down grade; which descent, since we found also a good foot-way beside the stream, made walking comparatively easy notwithstanding our heavy back-loads. Now and then our way would be barred by masses of rock fallen from above, and by whole trees blown down from their insecure roothold on the rocky cliffs; and twice we came to steep descents which would have given us trouble had we not brought along the ropes wherewith our packs had been bound. Shifting El Sabio down these places was our hardest task; but with the ropes, and the intelligent part that he took in the performance, we managed it successfully.

So we went on for half a dozen miles or more through the windings of the canon, but keeping all the while a sharp lookout ahead—for in the mouth of this end of the canon, supposing it to open as at the other end upon a grassy valley, we well enough might come upon an Indian camp. And that we had come upon such a camp we felt quite sure when, late in the afternoon, Rayburn signalled us from his advanced position—he having gone to the head of the line in Young's place—to stand still until he should reconnoitre a little. Being thus halted, we unslung our rifles and loosed our pistols in their holsters, so that we might be ready in case fighting suddenly should begin; and Rayburn went on around a turn in the canon, and for a while we lost sight of him.

Presently he returned and signalled us to join him, but to move cautiously. When we came up with him he led us to the bend in the canon, and there a broad view opened to us; for the canon suddenly widened into a great valley, that was everywhere, so far as we could see, surrounded by walls of rock almost perpendicular and vastly high. In the bottom of the valley was a broad expanse of delectably green meadow-land, broken here and there by groves of trees; and in the valley's middle part, reaching from side to side of it, was a lovely lake, whereof the blue was flecked by white reflections of certain little idly drifting clouds: the sight of all which greenness and fair water and broad range of sky—after being for so long a season pent up in rocky fastnesses and wandering over brown, sun-baked plains—fairly brought tears into my eyes because of its fresh and open loveliness. And in the tender feeling that thus stirred my heart, as I could see in the quick glance that he gave me, Fray Antonio also keenly sympathized; for his nature was very open at all times to such gentle influences.

But Rayburn and Young, as was evident from their anxious looks, were thinking only of the dangers which this lovely valley might hold in store for us; for the shore of the lake nearest to us had many houses built upon it, and we could see faintly, for the width of the lake was nearly two miles, that there were other houses upon its farther shore. Standing hidden behind a rock, Rayburn examined the valley carefully through a field-glass for a long while.

"I must say this place beats me," he said at last, as he put the glass down from his eyes. "There's no doubt about there being a down down there; but I can't make out a sign of a single living thing. And what is still queerer, the houses seem to go right down into the lake. If you'll take the glass, Professor, you'll see that a few of them, on this side, stand all right on dry ground; and then, farther down the sloping bank, are a lot in the water; and beyond these there seem to be some roofs just showing above the level of the lake. And as far as I can make out, things are just the same over on the far shore. It looks as if the lake had risen after the town was built."

As I looked through the glass I saw that what Rayburn had said was true; and I observed with much interest that many of the houses were large, and that all seemed to be well built of stone. Their construction reminded me of the buildings which M. Charnay examined at Tula, and I was eager to get down to them and examine them closely. Young and Fray Antonio took the glass, in turn, and as none of us saw any signs of life in the valley, we decided to go on. And we were mightily stimulated in this resolve by finding, just at the end of the canon, where the sharp descent began, a graving of the King's symbol on the rock, with the arrow pointing directly down the steep path.

"Here's a walled city, for sure," said Young; "and if this is where th' treasure-house is, we won't raise a row because th' folks have gone off an' left it. Just whoop up that burro of yours, Pablo, an' let's be gettin' along. It's a pity we had t' leave th' mules behind. If th' treasure's in silver, we can't get away with much of it with nothin' but El Sabio t' pack it on."

Pablo did not understand this speech, of course, but he recognized his own name and the name of El Sabio, and Young's gestures helped out the meaning of his words. Therefore Pablo grinned, and "whooped up" El Sabio; and we all set off briskly down the steep decline.

Presently we found our way much easier than we had been led to expect by its rough beginning. As we advanced along it there was ample evidence that the path had been graded and smoothed by the hand of man. In several places it was carried on a terrace supported by a well-laid retaining wall; a deep crevice was spanned by long slabs of stone, so placed as to form a bridge; and where it turned sharply around a high shoulder of rock, the face of the cliff had been quarried away. Yet that this all had been done in a very remote time was shown by the fragments of rock which had fallen into it here and there, and which were blackened by age. "The same fellow who set that statue in place probably was in charge here," was Rayburn's comment, "and he was a first-rate engineer. I wish I knew how he managed to swing those stone slabs over that crevice. There's no room there to set up a derrick, and it would puzzle me to set blocks like that without one."

And Rayburn's admiration for the professional skill of this engineer of a long past age was still further excited when the path came fairly into the valley, and thence was carried downward along the gentle slope towards the lake, by a perfectly even two-per-cent. grade, over a broad way paved smoothly with squared blocks of stone. And Fray Antonio and I were much interested in this work also, for we both perceived the identity of its structure with the paved way that is found on the east coast of Yucatan, and that is continued on the island of Cozumel.

By this paved avenue we entered the city—for, as we presently found, it was entitled to this more dignified name. The first houses that we came to were but small buildings enclosing a single room—such as are found, inhabited by working-people, on the outskirts of any Mexican city at the present day. They were silent and deserted; but they gave, at first sight, the impression of being but momentarily abandoned, for the belongings of their owners still remained in them as though the every-day affairs of life still went on within their walls. In the first that we entered we found an earthen pot still standing on a sort of fireplace, and beside the fireplace a little pile of charcoal. There was a fragment of bone in the pot, and beneath it were some scraps of charcoal which remained unconsumed. It was as though cooking had been going on here but an hour before. Rayburn even put his hand into the ashes to feel if they still were warm. But closer investigation gave us a juster notion of the long lapse of time that must have occurred since any fire had burned upon this hearth. In one corner of the room we found a pile of mats, but on touching these they crumbled into fragments in our hands; and the bone in the pot was so dry and so porous that it was light as cork.

As in this first house that we examined, so was it in all of them. All, at the first glance, seemed to have been but a moment before deserted; but all had signs about them which showed that they had been abandoned for a very long time. In one we found a loom—in construction very like that which the Navajo Indians use at the present day—on which hung, partly completed, a sheer filament that once had been some sort of heavy woollen cloth. In another, a cotton garment was lying carelessly upon a shelf, as though but a moment before cast aside; yet, as I tried to pick it up, it crumbled between my fingers into a fine powder.

Of humanity, the only sign that we found anywhere about this grim and desert place was the dried, shrivelled remnant of a woman that we came upon in an upper room of one of the larger houses farther on. She was lying upon a bed of mats, partly turned upon her side, and one arm was stretched out towards an earthen cup that stood just beyond her reach upon the floor. There was strong pathos in the action of the figure, for it told of the keen thirst of fever—of weakness so extreme that the inch or two between the hand and the cup was a gulf impassable—of a moaning struggle after the water so longed for—and then, at last, of death in that utter and desolate loneliness. And what added to the ghastliness of it all was that a thin ray of sunlight, coming through a crevice in the wall, struck upon the woman's teeth—whence the lips had dried away—and by its gleaming there made on her face a smile.

As we came close to the lake, we perceived, as Rayburn already had discerned by the aid of the glass, that houses, partially submerged, actually rose from the water, and that houses of which only the roofs were visible were farther on. That this whole valley was the crater of an extinct volcano was sufficiently evident; and we could only surmise that in later times some fresh cataclysm of nature had poured suddenly into it a vast body of water, and so had submerged the city that had been builded here. Whatever had brought about the catastrophe, it evidently had come with a most appalling suddenness. Everywhere the condition of the houses showed how hastily they had been abandoned; and the wild hurry of flight was shown still more clearly in the case of the woman—whose surroundings gave evidence that she had been a person of consequence—deserted in her age or infirmity and left lonely to die.

Young's face wore a melancholy expression as we stood upon the shore of the lake, and looked out across it towards the faintly seen western shore. "If this is th' place we're huntin' for," he said, "I guess our treasure stock is pretty badly watered, unless somebody's had th' sense t' keep th' treasure dry over on th' other side. We'd better move over there, I reckon, an' take a look for it, especially as we've got t' go that way anyhow in order t' get out. There ought t' be some sort of a path around th' lake, between th' edge of th' water and th' cliffs."

But when we came to examine into this matter we found that there was no path at all. On each side of the valley the walls of rock rose directly from the water, sharp and sheer.

"Well," said Rayburn, when we had finished our inspection, "we've got to get across somehow. I guess we'll have to sail in, the first thing to-morrow morning, and build a raft. These pine-trees down here by the water will cut easy and float well, and there's some comfort in that, anyway. But what I'm after right now is my supper."

Pablo already had started a fire, having first unpacked El Sabio, that he might refresh himself by rolling on the soft, green grass and by eating his fill of it, and Young presently had some ham fried and some coffee boiled. We had counted upon having fresh meat for supper that night, for there was everything in the look of the valley to promise that we would find game there; but, so far, not a four-footed thing nor a bird had we seen, nor even signs of fish in the lake.

In the morning we got out the axes and went to work at the building of the raft; and, notwithstanding what Rayburn had said in regard to the ease of cutting them, I must confess that for my part I found the cutting of pine-trees very wearying and painful. My hands were blistered by it, and the muscles of my back were made extremely sore by it for several days. Indeed, the construction of a raft big enough to float us all, and our heavy packs, and El Sabio, was a serious undertaking. We spent two days and a half over it, and I never in my life was more thankful for anything than I was when at last that wretched raft was done. As Young observed, as he regarded our finished work critically, there was no style about it—for it was only a lot of rough logs, of which the upper and lower layers ran fore and aft and the middle layer transversely, the whole bound together by our pack-ropes—but it was large enough for our purposes, and it was solid and strong.

In the late afternoon we carried our belongings on board of it, and Pablo succeeded by dint of much entreaty in inducing El Sabio to board it also, and we pushed off from shore. For driving the clumsy thing forward we had made four rough paddles, which well enough served our purposes, for there was no current whatever in the lake and the air was still.



As we went onward we discovered how considerable the city was that here lay submerged. Through the perfectly clear water we could see to a great depth, and beneath us in every direction were paved streets, lined with houses well built of stone. Near the centre of the valley the size of the houses greatly increased, and the fashion of their building was more stately; and fronting upon a great open square in the very centre of the city was a building of such extraordinary size that we took it to be the palace of a king; but here the water was so deep that we could make out but faintly the looming far below us of its mighty walls. Never have I been more pained than I then was; for in that place I found myself close to making discoveries of surpassing archaeological value, and yet I was as completely cut off from them as though they had no existence.

Just beyond the palace, as we went onward, our raft almost touched the roof of a noble building that stood upon the top of a vast pyramidal mound, the base of which we could see but dimly far down through the waters of the lake. This, evidently, had been the chief temple of the city; and as we passed over it and came to its eastern side, we had ghastly and certain proof of the terrible suddenness with which the city had been overwhelmed. On the broad terrace before the temple was the sacrificial stone, and upon this dark mass we saw distinctly the gleaming of human bones; and as we peered down into the water we perceived that all the terrace was strewn thickly with human bones also, showing that when the rush of water came many thousands of human beings had here perished miserably. For a little while, no doubt, all the surface of the water round about where we were had been dotted thickly with the bodies of the drowned which had floated upward; and then, one by one, they had sunk again to the place where death first found them—where their flesh wasted away from them until only their gleaming bones remained.

I pictured to myself the dreadful scene that once had passed, down there below us, where now was only the calm serenity of ancient death: the great crowd collected to witness the sacrifice, and then the sudden coming of the waters—possibly so quickly that the victim, held down by the neck-yoke upon the sacrificial stone, was drowned ere there was time to slay him. This great mound would be the last of all to be covered, and the wretched people gathered there must have seen their city disappear beneath the waters before death came to them. No doubt they thought themselves safe in that high place, made sacred by the presence of their gods. And when the water did reach them, what a writhing and struggling there must have been for a little while; what a crushing of the weak by the strong in mad efforts to gain even a moment's safety upon some higher standing-place! And then, at last, the water rose triumphant in its swelling majesty over all—and beneath its placid surface were hid the silenced terrors of all that commotion of mortal agony, whereof the outcome was the peaceful and eternal calm of death.



XII.

IN THE VALLEY OF DEATH.

As the raft approached the western shore of the lake we perceived beneath us no longer houses, but large walled enclosures which plainly had been gardens of pleasure—for gaunt trees, symmetrically planted in groves and beside stone-paved path-ways, yet stood in them; and seats of carved stone were placed in what once had been shaded nooks; and in many of the gardens were carved stone fountains of elegant design. Between the city and what once had been its charming suburb extended a broad paved way, like that which we had found upon the eastern shore; and this paved way was continued on the dry ground above the present level of the lake towards the cliffs westward. On the high western shore were a few houses, large and handsome, and having walled gardens around them, which evidently had belonged to persons of great wealth and consequence.

In these we found shadowy remnants of a past magnificence. On many of the walls were hangings, once rich and heavy, that now were mere films of ghostly stuff held together by the many gold threads which had been woven into their fabric. Pottery, wrought into beautiful shapes, yet ornamented with designs that told of but half-redeemed barbarism, was scattered about everywhere, and scarcely a piece was broken. Some very handsome weapons we found also—swords and spears and knives—of the same curious metal as the sword which Pablo so opportunely had laid hands upon in the canon, but far more finely finished and more delicate in design. And of this same metal was made a great throne, as it seemed to us to be, that was in the largest room of the finest of all the houses; a house that we believed was once the pleasure palace of the king. The audience-chamber in which this throne stood was of finely wrought stone-work, whereof the whole surface was covered with low-reliefs of men and animals—scenes of battle, of council, and of the chase—surrounded by curious tracery of such orderly design that Fray Antonio agreed with me in the belief that it was some sort of hieroglyphic writing. But this matter is treated of so fully in my Pre-Columbian Conditions on the Continent of North America that I need not enter upon discussion of it here.

But in none of these houses, much to the disappointment of Rayburn and Young, did we find any scrap of the treasure for which they so earnestly longed. And, truly, if treasure remained in this wrecked city, it was less likely to be in these outlying country houses than in some strong building in the city's heart; and so beyond their reach in the depths of the lake. If this were indeed the walled city for which we were searching—as well it might be, for never was a city surrounded by grander walls than the mighty cliffs wherewith the valley was encompassed—our search was like to be a vain one so far as mere treasure was concerned; though I, for my part, felt myself well repaid for all that I had thus far suffered by the discovery of so much that was of archaeological value. In this purer pleasure Fray Antonio shared; yet was he also dissatisfied—for he had come with us that he might preach Christianity to living souls: and here were only the bones of countless dead.

The paved way still led westward, and we followed it—for to the westward must be the valley's outlet. As it rose to a higher level the way widened; and on each side of it was a stone statue of the god Chac-Mool. As we came to these statues Young proceeded, in a most business-like way, and with no apparent appreciation of the queer figure that he cut, to sit down in turn on each of their heads. And he was mightily disappointed when he found that neither of them stirred. "They're not th' tippin' kind," he said, ruefully, as he got down from the head of the second one and looked at it with an expression of reproach.

But his countenance brightened, when we had gone a little farther, as he caught sight of another and much larger statue of the god that was set in a great niche cut in the cliff at the end of the paved way. To prepare here the god's abiding-place very arduous labor had been undertaken. For a space fully one hundred feet high and as many broad the whole face of the cliff had been quarried into; making a deep recess that was rounded above, and that from beneath was approached by a long flight of steps cut from the solid rock. In the centre of the recess, upon the terraced space above the stairs, was a huge squared mass of stone, on which the great stone figure of Chac-Mool rested. The opening faced directly eastward, and as we approached it the stone figure was seen but indistinctly in the duskiness of the recess, over which, and far beyond which into the valley, fell the shadow of the mighty cliff. From in front of this great altar all the valley was open to us; and hence, before the lake swallowed it, every part of the city must have been clearly visible in ancient times. As we mounted the steps and approached the idol I observed that Pablo hung back a little; as though in the depths of his nature some chord had been touched, some ancient instinct in his blood aroused, that filled his soul with awe.

Certainly there was no suggestion of awe in Young's demeanor towards the statue. With a monkey-like quickness, that I would not have given his stout legs and heavy body credit for, he climbed upon the altar and plumped himself down on the head of the figure almost in a moment. But again he was disappointed, for the idol did not stir. As we examined it closely we perceived that its fixedness was not unreasonable; for the figure, and the altar on which it rested, were one solid mass of rock that itself was a part of the cliff—left standing here when the niche around it was hollowed out. A very prodigious piece of stone-cutting all this was, and as I contemplated it I was filled with admiration of the skill of them who had achieved it. But Young came down from the idol moodily; and he said that the way these people had of playing tricks on travellers, by making Mullinses that didn't tip when they ought to tip, was quite of a piece with their putting their treasure where it couldn't be got at without a diving-bell.

Behind the altar the niche was cut into the cliff so far that the depths of it in the waning daylight were dusky with heavy shadows; indeed, so dense were these that Young came near to breaking his bones by falling into a little hole in the floor, that was the less easily seen because it was hidden behind a jutting mass of rock. But he caught the rock in time to save himself from falling, and eagerly struck a wax-match that he might see if here were a passage-way for us. Descending into the rock was a stair-way, the steps whereof were smoothed as though many feet had trodden them; and down these steps he promptly went, holding the lighted match before him—these Mexican wax-matches are as good as tapers—and having with him the full box of matches should further light be required. A minute later we heard his voice calling to us, but where it came from we could not tell—for he had descended into the rock below us, and the sound that we heard seemed to come from the air above. While we listened we saw the gleam of the light in the darkness below, and then he came up the stair laughing.

"Well, that's just th' boss trick," he said. "I guess th' old priests who used t' run this place would be everlastin'ly down on me if they knew that I'd tumbled to it. There's a hole right up into th' idol an' room inside of him for half a dozen men, an' there's a crack in his head that you can see out through while you're lettin' off prophecies an' that sort o' thing. Why, if you had a crowd t' work with who really believed in Jack Mullins, you could set 'em up for almost anything with a rig like that!"

But this curious discovery, in which Fray Antonio and I were deeply interested, did not forward our immediate purpose, which was to find a way out of the valley. We still cherished a faint hope, indeed, that we might find the King's symbol with the arrow pointing the way onward, and so be assured that the city buried in the depths of the lake was not the city of which we were in search. But in any event the need for getting out of the valley pressed upon us; and that we might accomplish our deliverance from this shut-in place, we examined closely the whole circuit of the cliffs at the western end. Not an inch of this great expanse of rock, for as far up the wall as our eyes could see clearly, escaped our attentive observation; yet nowhere was there, even by bold climbing, a place where the cliff might be scaled, still less an open path. And so, having walked slowly along the bottom of the cliffs to the edge of the lake on the north, and there turned upon our steps and come slowly back again to where we started from, and having made a like double journey of inspection to and from the edge of the lake to the south, we came at last to our first point of departure, and rested before the statue of Chac-Mool, disconsolate.

One discovery we had made in the course of our explorations which enabled us to understand how the fate that had overtaken the drowned city had fallen upon it. Close by the northern border of the valley we saw, high up above us, a vast rift more than a thousand feet wide in the face of the cliff; and below this the ground was torn into a deep wild channel, and everywhere huge fragments of rock were scattered over the ground. Here it was, then, that the water had poured in—bursting forth from a lake above—by which the city at one stroke had been overwhelmed. Some little notice, by the mighty roaring that must have accompanied so great a crash of rocks and so vast a rush of water, the dwellers in the city must have had; and the gleam of the pouring waters would have shown them the nature of the ruin that was upon them. There would have been time, before the water was waist-deep in the city streets, for them to make their way to the high mound on which their temple stood; and in the appalling horror of it all they might have clamored to their priests that a victim should be sacrificed to stay this terrible outburst of anger on the part of their gods. But it was more than likely that before the sacrifice could be completed they all—people, priests, and he who was to be sacrificed—perished together beneath the flood.

"Why," said Young, "th' Mill River disaster wasn't anything to it, an' that was pretty bad. I was runnin' th' way-freight on th' Old Colony road when that happened, an' I took a day off an' went up an' had a look at it. But this just lays that little horror out cold. It's as big as lettin' loose on Boston the whole of Massachusetts Bay."

That we should be prisoners in a place where death had wrought so swiftly such tremendous havoc was quite enough to fill our souls with a brooding melancholy. But in addition to the sombre thoughts which thus were forced upon us, bred of sorrow for the thousands who had here untimely perished, the gloomy dread of a more practical sort assailed us that we also in a little while would join the silent company of the thousands who had died here in a long past time. And the death that seemed to be in store for us was less merciful than that which had come to them. Theirs had been a short struggle, and then a gentle ending as the waters closed over them. But our ending was like to be a lingering one and miserable—by starvation.

With the loss of our mules and horses we had been compelled to leave behind us the greater portion of our stores; and for our protection against savages, and in the belief that in the mountains we should meet with an abundance of game, we had left almost all of our provisions, and made our lading mainly of ammunition and arms. But in this valley, so smiling and so beautiful, there was no live thing except ourselves. Not a beast, not a bird had we seen since we entered it; and in the lake, as we found presently, there were no fish; the only sign that animal life ever had existed here was that dried and withered remnant of a woman that we had found in the deserted house, and the bones which we had seen gleaming below us in the lake. This was, in truth, as we came thus to call it, the Valley of Death.

While we worked at building the raft we had not thought to be sparing in our eating—for building that raft was hungry work—and now that consideration of the matter was forced upon us, we found that we had with us food barely sufficient for three days. We could, of course, eat El Sabio—though such was our feeling towards that excellent animal that eating him would be almost like eating one of ourselves; and Pablo, we knew, would regard eating this dear friend of his as neither more nor less than sheer cannibalism. And even if we did eat El Sabio, the meat of his little body would but prolong our lives for a week, or possibly for two weeks more. And what then?

Had there been room in our souls for yet more sorrow, we could have had it in the thought that in all that we had set out to do we had completely failed. If this Valley of Death were indeed the place that we had been seeking, little good came to us from finding it. Of the souls which Fray Antonio had come forth to save, here there were none. Of archaeological discovery, truly, I had something to make me glad; yet little compared to what was hidden beneath the waters; and even this little, since knowledge of what I had found soon must die with me, was of no avail. As for Rayburn and Young, the treasure which they sought might or might not be near at hand; but they certainly could no more come at it than, were it heaped up before them, they could carry it away. And most of all was my heart troubled by the fate that was like to overtake Pablo because of his love for me. Bitterly I blamed myself for permitting the boy to come with me; for I should have foreseen that a hundred chances might intervene to render impossible my intention to give him his free choice to go or to stay when the decisive turning-point in our adventure came. In point of fact, one of these chances had intervened; and the attack upon us that the Indians had made, and the closing of the passage in the rock behind us that rendered return impossible, had forced him to remain with us without voice of his own in the matter; and now would bring him, as it would bring the rest of us, to the most horrible death of which a man can die.

Night was falling as we ended our search along the cliffs for a way of escape, and found none, and so came again in front of the great idol—where our packs had been left heaped up, and where the Wise One, happily unmindful of the fate that might soon be in store for him, was energetically cropping the rich grass. We built a fire, for the air in that deep valley, mingling with the mists rising from the lake, was damp and chill; and beside the fire we made our evening meal. There was no good in talking about what was so apparent to all of us; but Young, who was our cook, showed his appreciation of the situation practically by serving only half rations and by making our coffee very thin and poor.

Silently we ate our short allowance of food; and thereafter we smoked our pipes with but little talk for seasoning, and that little of a melancholy sort. Of our own plight we did not speak at all, but in what we said there was constantly a reflection of the bitter sorrow with which all our hearts were charged. I remember that Young, who truly was as merry a man naturally as ever I knew, told us that night only of dreadful railroad accidents—of wrecks in which men lay crushed among the heaped-up cars, shrieking with the agony of their hurts; and then shrieking with dread, and with yet greater pain as the fire that seized upon the ruin around them came nearer and nearer until they fairly were roasted alive. And Rayburn told of a prospecting party besieged by Indians upon a mountain peak in Colorado; how, one by one, they slowly died in a raving horror of thirst until one man alone was left; and how this one man prolonged his life until rescue came by drinking the blood of his own body, and yet died in raging madness almost at the moment that he was saved.

For myself, I had nothing to add to these horrors; yet such was my frame of mind that I found a certain bitter gladness in listening to the telling of them, and in tracing between them and our own case the ghastly parallel. In our talk, which wont on in English, Fray Antonio took no part; but he could follow well enough the meaning of it in our tones. On his face was an expression of tender melancholy that seemed to me to tell of sorrow for us rather than of dread of what might be in store for himself; and that this truly was his mood was shown when the others paused, sated and appalled by the horrors which they had conjured up, and he spoke at last.

It was not a sermon that Fray Antonio gave us; but out of the abundant store of faith by which he himself was sustained he strove to comfort us with thoughts of better things than life can give. And with the promise of hope that he held out to us with the solemn authority that was vested in him by reason of the service to which he was vowed, he mingled a certain yearning for us, very moving, that came of the love and the tender gentleness that were in his own heart. And yet, though he knew that, excepting Pablo, we all were heretics according to his own creed, there was no word of doctrine in all of his discourse. Rather was what he said a simple setting forth of that primitive Christianity which has its beginning and its ending in a simple faith in an all-pervading, all-protecting love. And of this love, as it seemed to me, he himself was the human embodiment. Looking in his gentle face, which yet had such high courage, such noble resolution in it, I felt that in him the spirit of the saints and martyrs of long past ages lived again.

With our souls soothed and strengthened by what Fray Antonio had spoken to us, we lay down at last to sleep; yet was it impossible for us to drive out from our hearts that natural sadness which men must feel who know that they have failed in a strong effort to accomplish a project very dear to them, and who know also that they are standing upon the very threshold of a most tormenting death.



XIII.

UP THE CHAC-MOOL STAIR.

We awoke the next morning at the very moment that the sun rose above the mountain peaks to the eastward; and our waking was due in part to the sunshine striking upon our faces, but more to the prodigious braying, that echoed thunderously from the cliffs around us, with which El Sabio welcomed the advent of the god of day.

"It is a good sign, senor," said Pablo, "when El Sabio brays thus nobly at sunrise. He does not do it often, but when he does I know beyond a doubt that I am to have a lucky day."

"An' I must say," Young struck in, "that for a man who expects t' have t' eat his boots in th' course of a day or two I'm feelin' this mornin' most uncommonly chipper myself. For one thing, I mean t' have another look around that idol. I'm not at all sure that he's not th' tippin'-up kind. Maybe we didn't put enough weight on him yesterday; or he may do his tippin' up from th' other end. Anyhow, I'm goin' t' have another whack at him as soon as I've eat my breakfast; an' that's a performance that won't take long t' get through with, considerin' how thunderin' little there is t' eat."

Truly, the eating of our breakfast did not consume much time; and, so short did Young make our rations, I am not sure that we were not hungrier at the end of it than we were at its beginning. When we finished, the sun was still low in the east; and the bright rays struck full upon the statue of Chac-Mool, on the great stone altar, and into the depths of the niche that had been hollowed behind it in the face of the cliff. We observed that the idol was so placed that the very first rays of the sun, coming through a cleft between two great peaks to the eastward, shone brightly upon it, while yet all the rest of the valley save the cliff above the niche remained in shade.

With the strong sunlight deeply penetrating it, the recess behind the altar no longer was filled with the black shadows that had obscured it on the previous afternoon; and even the hole into which Young so nearly had fallen was plainly visible. Taking advantage of the better light, the lost-freight agent—who certainly had found a fitting berth in that department of railway service, for such a man for hunting for things, and for finding them, I never came across—made a more careful examination of the deeper portion of the recess, and presently he gave a shout that told of a discovery.

As we gathered around him he pointed in great excitement to a row of metal pegs, which were fixed in the rock one above the other, diagonally; and then to the point in the roof of the recess towards which these pegs tended. Even with the strong light that now aided us it was some time before I could make out among the black shadows of the roof a small opening; but the longer that I looked at it the more distinct it grew.

"We've struck th' trail once more," Young cried. "We've struck it sure. It don't look promisin', but here it is—for if this ain't th' King's symbol carved right by th' first of these pegs, then you're all at liberty t' kick me right smack over th' top of that idol for a d——n fool! Hurrah!"

Pablo could not understand what Young was saying, but it was easy to perceive from his gestures the nature of the happy discovery that he had made. In a tone in which deference and triumph were curiously blended, Pablo said to me: "Did I not tell you, senor, that a good thing always happens when El Sabio brays at the rising sun?"

Before Pablo had ended this short but exultant deliverance, Young was half-way up to the roof of the cave, treading gingerly upon the metal bolts and testing each one before he trusted his weight to it. In a couple of minutes he reached the roof and disappeared through the hole; and almost instantly he called down to us: "We're solid—here's a regular staircase. Come along!"

We followed him promptly enough; while our hearts thrilled, and all our bodies trembled, with the gladness that possessed us as we found this way opening to us from the valley wherein we had thought that surely we must die. In a little chamber, cut in the rock above the opening into which the ladder of bolts led us, Young was waiting for us; and from this chamber a spiral stair-way ascended that was dimly lighted by crevices cut from it out to the face of the cliff. With Young leading us, up this we went; at first rapidly, but, later, slowly and wearily, for it seemed as though the stair would never end. Yet though our bodies were heavy our spirits were very light; for we know by the wearisome length of it that the stair must lead to the very top of the towering cliffs by which we had believed ourselves to be irrevocably shut in. And at last there was a gleaming of light above us; and this grew stronger and stronger until we came out with a shout of joy into the glad sunlight—and saw far below us the valley that we once more thought beautiful, now that it no longer held us fast.

In the depth below us we could discern El Sabio, looking no bigger then a rabbit; and he must have caught the sound of our shouting with those long ears of his, for there came up to us faintly from him an answering bray.

"It's pretty hard lines on that jackass," said Young, "leaving him behind down there. But he might be left in a worse place, after all."

I could perceive that Pablo was stirred by uneasy thoughts of the separation that now so clearly must take place between him and his dear friend; and he looked wistfully along the path across the mountain to the westward—cut and smoothed so that it was an easy path to go on—and evidently thought how simple a matter it would be for El Sabio to travel on with us if only once he were up the stair. But he did not speak, and I hoped that he was nerving himself to bear manfully this sore trial. For the rest of us, we had but one thought: to get our packs up the stair-way as quickly as possible—and at its quickest this work would be slowly and painfully done—and then once more go forward. Just as we turned to descend again an eagle came sailing slowly towards us—evidently without fear of us—and Rayburn was so fortunate as to bring him down with a pistol-shot. We tossed him over the edge of the cliff; and a famous breakfast we made on him when we returned into the valley again. I can't say that I would have much stomach for so dirty a bird now, but I certainly did think that eagle most delicious eating then.

The hearty meal that we made on him strengthened us mightily, and we went to work with a will at getting our traps up the stair. With our pack-ropes we hauled the various articles first into the little room at the stair-foot, and then toilsomely carried them to the heights above. Saving only that this work did not blister my hands, it was worse than the building of the raft had been; and all of us, using in climbing and in descending the stair certain muscles which normally are not brought often into play, found our legs so stiff and sore for the next day or two that walking gave us very lively pain.

It was as this heavy work went slowly forward that Pablo said to me, speaking in an insinuating and deprecating tone: "Up a stair such as this is, senior, the Wise One would bound like a deer."

I did not call in question Pablo's simile, for I knew that the boy's heart must be very sad. Laying my hand kindly upon his shoulder, I answered in a way to show that I was truly sorry for him: "The Wise One will lead a happy life, Pablo, in this beautiful valley—where nothing can do him harm, and where he will have an abundance of water and of rich fresh grass. Up the stair no doubt he could climb, for he knows wonderfully well how to use those dainty little feet of his; but even the Wise One could not climb up the ladder of metal bolts. Therefore must thou strengthen thy heart against the bitterness of this parting from him; for even if thou wouldst stay behind with him it is not possible—for thou canst not live, like the Wise One, on water and grass."

"But he is so little and so light an ass, senor," Pablo urged, "that surely, all of us pulling together, we could pull him up by the ropes, even as the other things have been pulled up; surely, surely, senor, that would be an easy thing for four men to do—and I also can pull at the ropes, senor, almost as well as any man."

It did not seem to me that even all of us pulling together could sway El Sabio up a hundred feet through the air; but Pablo was so pitiful in his entreaties, and seemed so resolutely bent upon remaining behind in the valley and dying there with his dear friend rather than go on without him, that I opened the matter to Rayburn and joined my plea to Pablo's that this curious effort should be made. And in addition to the sentimental reason for taking the ass with us, I pointed out to Rayburn—as, indeed, he understood without my telling him—how practically valuable El Sabio was to us in helping us to bear our heavy loads. Rayburn thought with me that the dead lift of so considerable a weight to such a height, without tackle of any sort to help us, was impossible. But Young, who had an inventive strain in his composition, was of the opinion that he could set up such rough tackle as would answer our purpose; upon understanding which, Pablo at once embraced El Sabio and danced for joy.

Young was, I think, the handiest man I ever knew. He had a natural genius for mechanics; and in the many years of his railroad life he had gained a knowledge of all manner of expedients by which the work of complicated machinery could be accomplished by very simple means. "When you have a freight smash-up right in the middle of the section," he said, "with nobody to help you inside of forty miles, and the express due to come bouncing down on you inside of two hours, you've just got to get things out of the way whether you've got anything to do it with or not. If I had the equipment of a first-class freight-cab here I'd yank that burro up inside of twenty minutes; and if I don't do it, anyway, inside of two hours I'll promise to eat him."

I did not translate the whole of this speech to Pablo, for talk even in fun about eating El Sabio was rather a delicate matter, considering how close a shave that worthy animal had had to being eaten in dead earnest; but I did tell him that the Senor Young felt sure that he could swing El Sabio up through the air to where the stair began. And with Pablo—who also could use his hands well—most willingly helping, Young contrived in a surprisingly short time to make a rough windlass, that was effective enough for the work to be done with it, and to pull it up bit by bit into the chamber in the rock and there fit it together over the hole. El Sabio, being brought into the recess behind the idol, regarded us all with a doubting expression that even Pablo's repeated assurances that we meant well by him could not change into a look of trustfulness. Pablo declared, however, that in his heart of hearts the Wise One knew that we all were his friends, and that even though we should hurt him a little he would understand that it was for his good. And the conduct of the ass during the exceedingly bad half-hour that he then went through seemed fully to bear out Pablo's words. Around his small body, with stays running forward around his neck and aft to his tail, we rigged looped ropes—which ropes were gathered together above his back and there made fast to the line that was pendent from the windlass above. From time to time, as this operation was going forward, El Sabio turned his head upon one shoulder or the other and gazed with a wistful expression at what we were doing to him; and the slow shake that he gave his head, whereby his great ears were set to wagging mournfully, as he finished each of these inspections, betrayed the grave wonder that was within him as to what it all could mean, together with a not unnatural apprehension of what might be its ultimate outcome.

By a good chance, the effect upon the Wise One of finding the solid earth drop suddenly from beneath his feet—when at last all was in readiness, and Young and Rayburn began to hoist away at the windlass—was to render him quite rigid with terror; and there was a most agonized look upon his face as he went sailing up through the air. Pablo, standing below with me, that we might steady the ass with a guy-rope during his ascent, addressed to him all manner of tender and comforting words; but for once the Wise One seemed to be insensible to his master's voice. Neither with his eyes nor his ears did he respond; and he well enough might have been taken for a dead ass going heavenward, but for the sharp twitchings of his tail. And when at last he was safely within the upper chamber, he fairly fell down upon the rocky floor of it in sheer exhaustion begot of fright. It was not until we had passed up a bucket of water to him, whereof he drank the very last drop, and had been soothed by Pablo's fondling of him and by Pablo's gentle words, that his broken spirit revived. And so limp and weak was he that it was a long while before we could in conscience urge him to ascend the stair. When at last he set himself to this undertaking, he was far from accomplishing it in the bounding and deer-like manner that Pablo had promised for him; but he certainly did at last get to the top—which was all that was required of him—and there drank gratefully the bucketful of water that Pablo had carried up that great height for his comforting when his toilsome climbing should end. And Pablo went down into the valley once more that night in order to bring back to his friend a hearty supper of rich grass.



By the time that all this hard work was accomplished the day was nearly at an end; and even had there been light for us to see our way by we were too tired to go on—for every bone and muscle in our bodies was weary and sore. Therefore we made our camp for the night on the flat expanse of rock where the stair ended; and we were thankful that enough of the eagle remained to us for our supper—and, indeed, we made our breakfast on him also, for he was a prodigiously large bird. Very different were our feelings as we wrapped ourselves in our blankets and settled ourselves to sleep on that open mountain-top—with the path clear before us, and with the cheering hope in our hearts that among the mountains we should find a plenty of wild creatures suitable for food—from the dull despairing languor that had possessed us as we sank to sleep the night before. And with our joy was also a reverent thankfulness—that was more strongly stimulated by certain words which Fray Antonio spoke ere we lay down to rest—that our deliverance was accomplished from that death-stricken valley wherein we ourselves so surely had expected that we must die.



XIV.

THE HANGING CHAIN.

By the winding way which we followed along the mountain-top (and that this was the way we wished to follow the King's symbol and the pointing arrow plainly showed), we came presently close beside the rift in the cliffs through which the waters of the upper lake had been discharged upon the city in the valley below and so had buried it. And here we made a very surprising discovery—which was no less than that the great rift in the rocks through which the water had been let loose was not, as we had supposed, the result of some fierce convulsion of nature, but very plainly was the fiercer work of man. Along the face of the opening whence the water had poured forth the rock was grooved, showing that drill-holes had been made, close together, from the edge of the cliff backward to the lake that once had filled all the valley now lying bare and empty before us; and with the field-glass we could see that there was a like channelling of the rock upon the farther side of the break. And all doubt in our minds in regard to this matter was removed by our finding a vastly long drill—made of the bright, hard metal that we now were familiar with, yet could not at all understand its composition—lying close beside the chasm upon the bare rock.

"There has been the devil's own work here!" said Rayburn, as he fully took in this extraordinary situation. "Whoever did this must have spent months over it, perhaps years, working with such tools as these. They evidently went at it systematically, with the deliberate intention of drowning the whole crowd down below. From an engineering stand-point I must say that it's a good piece of work. See how cleverly they've picked out this particular spot, where the wall of rock went down almost perpendicularly into the lake, and so got the full value of the thrust of the water when their cuts were finished. If I'm not mistaken, there was a third line of drill-holes sunk in the middle of the mass that they meant to cut loose. That's the way I should have done it: then there would have been a little giving in the centre that would have helped to loosen the sides. But what a lot of incarnate devils they must have been to go at such a job!"

Truly, there was something chilling to the blood in the thought of the slow labor of them who had toiled here, day after day and month after month, until their ghastly purpose was accomplished, and they had slain a whole city without striking a single honest blow. Such vengeance upon an enemy as here was taken never had its equal for cold, malignant cruelty since the world began. Down in the valley below we had seen gleaming beneath the calm surface of the lake the bones of the thousands who had perished when this diabolical work was completed, and the waters bounded forth, shining and sparkling in the sunlight, on their mission of death. And whoever let them loose must have stood just where we now were standing; and at sight of what came of their long labor there must have been such joy as no hell could adequately punish in their black hearts.

Our bodies shuddered as we turned and left the scene of this tremendous tragedy; that was the more appalling to us because of the profound mystery in which was buried everything related to it save the fact that it had been.

For a long distance our way went onward beside the bare, deep valley that had been the basin of the lake, and so the thought of the horror which had been wrought so devilishly with its innocent waters lingered gloomily in our minds. Involuntarily we associated the unknown people of a long past time who had perpetrated this hideous wholesale murder with the people for whom we now were searching, and an uncertain dread filled our souls as to what might be our own fate should we end by finding what we sought. From the tender mercies of a race in which stealthy craft and cold, malignant cruelty evidently were such conspicuous characteristics, little was to be expected. Therefore, it was in a sombre mood, and with but little talk among us, that we went forward upon our way.

The path that we followed showed the same care in the making of it that we had found in the path leading down from the canon into the valley where the drowned city was. Throughout the length of it, by carrying it skilfully along the windings of the mountain-sides, an equable, easy grade was maintained; where it led across open spaces the loose stones had been cleared away and stood heaped along each side of it; where it skirted precipices the solid rock had been cut out in order to give a wider and a surer foothold; and here and there in its course crevices which traversed it were bridged with great slabs of stone. Rayburn was lost in admiration of the engineering skill that was shown in its construction, and declared that a very little extra work put on it would fit it for the laying of a line of rails.

The valley on our right, in which the lake had been, narrowed as we advanced; and as the path that we followed had a steadily rising grade (according to Rayburn's estimate, of a trifle more than three per cent.), the bottom of it fell away rapidly. As we reached what had been, as we found, the foot of the lake, we discovered fresh evidence of the enormous amount of labor that had been expended in order to make its waters an effective engine of destruction. Far in the depths beneath us, extending across the whole width of the valley—but here the valley had so narrowed that it was less a valley than a canon—we saw a high and vastly broad stone wall. It was then that we perceived fully the whole of the devilish design, and realized the years that must have been given to its execution. By the building of the wall the level of the lake had been raised fully three hundred feet, and so a head of water had been obtained strong enough to thrust out the mass of rock that had been loosened by drilling through its centre and at its sides. It would have been possible, also, for the rock that was to be broken away to be greatly thinned by quarrying its open face while the water was rising slowly after the great dam was built. Clearly, the whole work had been planned with a calm, diabolical ingenuity that assured with absolute certainty the accomplishment of the horrible purpose that those who labored at it had in view. It seemed impossible, but for the proof that we here had of it, that human hearts could have in them enough of purely devilish cruelty to spend years in thus working out to perfection so hideous a vengeance; and to me it seemed all the more dreadful because of the time that had passed since this most evil deed was done. Centuries had vanished, and the slayers—living out the few years of their lifetime—had perished from off the earth as utterly as had the slain; yet here the whole proof of the great crime that had been wrought lived on in enduring stone that was like to last until the very end of the world should come. Thus had these sinners left behind them, raised by their own hands, a monument telling of their sin; which sin had not even the redeeming quality of passionateness, but was slow and subtle and cruelly cold.

We were glad to turn from sight of this place and press onward into the canon, for such the valley now had become; and we found in the dark shadows which enveloped us in this deep cleft between the mountains a sombreness in keeping with the feelings in our hearts. So high above us towered the cliffs that at their top they seemed almost to meet, showing between them only a narrow ribbon of bright blue sky, and below us the chasm went down sheer for a thousand feet; a gloomy depth that our eyes could not have penetrated had there not gleamed at the bottom of it the foam and sparkle of a little stream. Here the path was hewn almost continuously out of the solid rock; and we could see that a like path was cut in the rock on the other side. That so prodigious a piece of work should be thus duplicated seemed to us a very astonishing waste of energy; for even Young did not have much faith in his own suggestion that two prehistoric railway companies had secured rights of way along the opposite sides of the canon, and had begun the building there of rival lines.

But the matter was explained, presently, by our finding that this other path was but a doubling of the path that we were on. As we rounded a turn in the canon we came suddenly to a broad natural ledge in the rock, over which hung a great projection of the cliff so that the sky above was hid from us. Here our path went off into the air, and began again on the other side of the vastly deep chasm, a good sixty feet away. "Rather long for a jump," was Rayburn's curt comment as we pulled up on the edge of the precipice and looked at each other blankly. Yet it was evident that those who had made with such great expense of toil and time these path-ways on the opposite sides of the canon had crossed in some way from the one to the other at this point, and the only surmise that seemed to fit the facts of the case was that there had been stretched across the chasm a swinging bridge of lianas—such as still are to be found spanning streams in the hot lands of Mexico—and that in the course of ages this had rotted entirely away. But as this bridge, if ever there had been one here, was absolutely gone, we found ourselves in as shrewdly strait a place as men well could be in. To go ahead was as clearly impossible as was the hopelessness of turning back upon our path. At the most, we could only return to the valley out of which we had climbed with such thankfulness; and rather than go back to die of starvation in that place, so beautiful and so desolate, there was not one of us but would have chosen to end all quickly by springing into the gulf above which we stood.

But while we thus stood in dreary contemplation of the miserable prospect before us, Young, as his habit was, was spying about him sharply, and so spied out a way of deliverance for us. The announcement of his discovery was made in a very characteristic way.

"You set up to be some punkins of an engineer, now don't you?" he said, addressing Rayburn. "But did you ever happen to hear of a bridge that was hung up at one end an' that was operated by swingin' it backward an' forward like a pendulum?"

"No," Rayburn answered, promptly and decisively, "I never did."

"So I thought," Young went on. "Well, you've admitted that in sev'ral things th' man who was in charge of construction on this line could have given you points, an' this swingin' bridge notion is one of 'em. I can't say that I think much of it. It wouldn't do in railroads, for sure; but there is a good deal to be said in favor of it when it helps folks out of such a hole as we're in now—an' if it still is in workin' order, that is just what it's going to do. There it is. Do you catch on?"

We all looked in the direction in which Young pointed, for his gesture was so earnest that even Fray Antonio and Pablo caught the meaning of it, and so saw—pendent from a point far up on the overhang of rock, and but indistinctly showing in the shadow—a great chain that at its lower end was caught in a metal hook set in the face of the cliff at the extreme back of the ledge on which we stood. For my part, I did not at once catch the meaning of Young's words even when I saw the chain, but Rayburn understood it all in a moment.

"By Jove!" he exclaimed, "that is a notion! You grab the end of it and just swing across to the other side!"

Young already had loosened the chain from the hook and was testing its strength by putting his weight on it. At the end of it was a crossbar big enough to get a good grip upon; and this, and the chain itself, were wrought of the bright, hard metal of which we had encountered so many specimens. The upper end was made fast high above us in the out-jut of rock, very nearly over the centre of the canon; so that no great force was required to carry whoever grasped the crossbar, and so swung out boldly, clear across the chasm to the ledge on the other side. But I confess that the thought of such a passage made me feel a little dizzy and sick; and never did I long to be safely back in my class-room at Ann Arbor as I did just then!

"It seems t' be all right," said Young, "but I guess you may as well take a pull on it with me, Rayburn. There'd be no fun in havin' it fetch away when a man was about half across, an' we may as well make th' thing sure." And then, as the chain still held firm under the double strain, he added, "Well, here goes;" and, so speaking, took a running start and went swinging out over the abyss.

My heart was in my mouth as he leaped forth and shot out from and far below us; but in a moment he rose along the curve that he was traversing and was safely landed on the other side. "It's a boss invention. Workin' it is just as easy as rollin' off a log," he called across to us; and to show how easily the passage was made, he instantly swung himself back again.

Pablo had manifested signs of strong uneasiness while this talk and action were in progress, and in a very anxious tone he now inquired: "But how will it be with the Wise One, senor?"

"Why, gettin' him across will be as easy as open an' shut," Young answered, speaking in English to Rayburn and to me. "We'll just rig him in th' rope slings again, an' make him fast to th' chain, an' give him a good boost to start him, and over he'll go before he fairly knows he's started."

But when we came to apply this brisk statement of the case practically, we found it by no means easy of execution. El Sabio grew restive as we arranged the slings of rope about his body, evidently remembering, fearfully, the strange journey that he had made in the air when we had rigged him in a like manner in order to trice him up to where the stair began; and he grew yet more restive as we fastened the rope slings to the end of the chain. Rayburn had crossed to the other side—passing the chain back by weighting it with a rock—and stood ready to receive El Sabio when he was swung across. But partly owing to a want of skill in our management of him, yet more to his own unruliness—for just as we started him, with a strong push, he clapped down his fore-feet upon the edge of the cliff and so checked his swing outward—he did not swing within reach of Rayburn's hands. And so he came back towards us again, and then out once more towards Rayburn; and so swung slowly and yet more slowly until at last he hung motionless over the very middle of the gulf, with nothing between him and the rocks below but a thousand feet of air. And then El Sabio began to kick with a vigor that set to rattling every link in the chain!

Pablo was cast by this mischance into a veritable frenzy of fright; and we were most seriously frightened also—not only because the destruction of the poor ass was imminent, but because of the danger which menaced ourselves. Our party was divided, and should the chain give way, under stress of El Sabio's kicks and plunges, all possibility of our coming together again was at an end. Rayburn might leave us and go on; and so, perhaps, save his own life. But for the rest of us there would be no hope. Behind us was death by starvation. In front of us was this impassable gulf.

From Pablo, who was quite wild with dreadful anticipations of the parting of the chain and the loss to him forever of his friend, least was to be expected in the strait wherein we were; yet it was from Pablo that our rescue came. With a quick apprehension of the needs of the case, he rove a running-knot in the end of one of the pack-ropes, and with a dexterous cast of this improvised lasso set the loop of it about El Sabio's neck as that unfortunate animal for a moment ceased his strugglings and hung still. And then we all strained on the rope together, and in a minute had El Sabio safely with us again; but in such a state of terror that pity for him wrung our hearts.

But the limpness which the reaction from such deadly fear threw him into made handling him easy; and this time, when we launched him forth (taking the precaution, however, to fasten one end of a rope to the chain), he went sailing across the full width of the chasm, and Rayburn in a moment had him landed in safety. The instant that the chain was loosened Pablo hauled it back, and an instant later swung lightly across the canon, and straightway fell to fondling the terrified creature and comforting him with all manner of tender words. And he so piteously besought us to give El Sabio one good drink that we passed the water-keg and the bucket across, and permitted the poor ass to drink half of our stock of water without debate of the sacrifice. Indeed, this refreshment was so necessary to him that without it I doubt if he could have gone on.

While El Sabio thus gathered courage and strength again, Young swung over to the other side, and we passed our stores across from ledge to ledge—having ropes made fast to the chain, and so steadying each load from the one side while we hauled from the other. This was easy work, and we quickly finished it. When it was ended I braced myself for the flying journey through the air across that gulf so deep that the bottom of it was lost in black shadows, through which the sparkling water faintly gleamed; and my heart so throbbed within me as I took the bar in my hands, with the knowledge that should I lose hold of it death waited for me below in those dark shadows, that my breath came irregularly and I heard a dismal ringing in my ears. Yet I had less to fear than either of the others who had crossed before me, for the ropes still were fast to the chain; and should I not swing far enough I would be helped to safety by my companions. But for shame, I should have made my body fast to the chain by a rope sling, and so have gone across as our stores had gone rather than as a man. But my pride forbade my surrender in this fashion to my fears; and it was a lucky thing for me that it did.

Holding the bar in my hands, I ran briskly across the ledge, and, with a strong kick on the edge of the cliff to give me additional impetus, I went spinning out into space. For an age, as it seemed to me, I sank rapidly; while that horrible feeling possessed me—the like of which people subject to sea-sickness feel as the ship drops away beneath them into the trough of the sea—of falling away from my own stomach. And then, just as my strength seemed to be failing, and my hold on the bar loosing, I perceived that I was rising again; and this put a little fresh heart in me, and I tightened my grip on the bar. Ten seconds, no doubt, was the full extent of the time that my passage consumed; but it seemed to me then, and it seems to me still as I think of it, a long ten years. And a thrill of terror goes through me as I think also of how near I then came to a horrible death; for at the very moment that I reached the farther side of the canon there was a little tinkling sound in the air above me, and the bar that I held was twitched out of my hands, and then came a loud jingling of metal on rock, and as I turned quickly I saw a gleam of sunlight catch the great chain as it went twisting downward into the black gulf below.



XV.

THE TEMPLE IN THE CLOUDS.

Doubtless the violent strain to which the chain had been subjected by El Sabio's kicking and plunging had loosened the fastenings, centuries old, which held it to the rock; for the chain had not broken, but had come away entire. I sank down on the rock as weak with terror as the poor ass had been; and like him I drank greedily of water, and panted for a while, and at last found my courage coming back to me.

Yet my case was a happy one compared with that of Fray Antonio. Howsoever narrow my escape had been, the fact remained that I had come out from my encounter with Death safe and unharmed; but on Fray Antonio's shoulder we could but dread that Death already had laid his hand. And that he knew how close to him Death was standing we could see by a certain elate and confident air of courage in his bearing, and by the wonderful tenderness and sweetness of his smile. Truly, never did I know a man so ready at all times as this man was to lay down the life that God had given him; holding it but as a trust that might at any moment be called back to the source whence it came. Yet because it was a trust, meant to be put to useful purposes, Fray Antonio valued his life and cared for it. And at this time it was he himself who devised a plan by which it might be saved.

The ropes which were fastened to the chain, being held stoutly on the one side by Fray Antonio and on the other by Young, fortunately had broken as the great weight of the chain suddenly had come upon them, and had broken so close to the knots which held them that nearly the whole of their length remained. The plan that the monk now devised for coming across to us—and a bold heart was required even to think of this daring enterprise—was that with the two ropes fastened about his body at one end, and held by all of us at the other, he should swing down into the chasm and far under the promontory of rock on which we stood, and then that we should haul him up to us. The great difficulty in the way of executing this plan was in getting the line across between us; its great danger lay in the probability—notwithstanding the depth of the recess beneath us—that he would be dashed against the rocks with such force as to kill him outright.

But Young, who usually was ready for any emergency that might arise, roused out a ball of twine that was a part of our stores, and one end of this he made fast to a fragment of rock, and by a strong heave of it landed it safe on the other side; whereafter the rigging of the double rope across was an easy matter.

Very carefully, testing the knots as he made them, Fray Antonio fastened the double line about his body, beneath his shoulders, and so stood ready on the edge of the chasm; while we four stood holding the line, with all our muscles braced for the strain that would come upon it as he swung downward. For a moment he paused, with his face turned upward while his lips moved. Then he waved his hand, and smiled as he called across to us, "It is as God wills!" and so dropped away from the ledge, and like a flash went down beyond our range of sight.

We felt the jar on the ropes as his body struck against the face of the cliff far below us, and the reflex action as he swung out again, and thereafter the slower motion of the ropes as he swayed back and forth dangling over that black and awful chasm. And as the ropes settled into steadiness we drew him up towards us; yet dreaded, because of the dull weight of it, and because no assuring cry came up to us, that what we lifted was a corpse.

And, in truth, as we raised the body of Fray Antonio over the edge of the cliff it seemed as though this dread were realized; for a great bloody gash was upon his temple, and his limbs were limp and lifeless, and his face was deathly pale. At sight of which there came into my heart a bursting pain, as though some one had stabbed me there; and there were tears in Young's eyes; and Rayburn gave vent to his sorrow in a great curse that was half a groan. As for Pablo, whom no danger could daunt, and who would bear without flinching any hurt of his own, this dreadful sight so moved him that he fainted dead away.

Yet even in the moment that such deep sorrow seemed to be settling down upon us, Fray Antonio slightly moved his lips, and there came forth from them a low faint sigh—whereupon Young jumped up with a shout and relieved his mind by administering to Pablo a hearty kick, which he accompanied with the remark: "You infernal fool of a Greaser Indian, what do you mean by swoundin'? He ain't dead at all!"

As tenderly as I could for the trembling of my hands, I washed away the blood from about the cut and bathed Fray Antonio's pale face, while Rayburn gave him a sup of whiskey from his flask. And then, presently, his eyes opened and energy came into his body once more. In a little while he was on his feet again, and as well as ever, save for the smarting of his cut, and in his head a dizziness and a dull throbbing pain. Just what had happened he could not tell. He knew that he had struck against the rock with his feet, as he had planned to do; but he must have swung around, when the force of the impact had been thus partly broken, and struck his head against some sharp projection, and so have been cut and stunned. But it made no great difference how his hurt had come to him, since it had not proved to be a deadly one; therefore we forbore to question him further concerning it, and sought by quiet talk, that led softly into silence, to take his thoughts away from the peril that he had been in. Indeed, we all were glad to rest quietly where we were for the night, for our bodies were tired and our nerves were racked and strained.

We should have been most thankful for a big potful of coffee, but there was no wood with which we could make a fire. The best that we could do, and there was not much comfort in it, was to chew some coffee grains after we had made a supper upon one of our few remaining tins of meat; and then we rolled ourselves in our blankets and lay down upon the bare rock. And I must say that if anybody had asked me at that moment if archaeology was a study that paid for the trouble that it cost, I should have said most unhesitatingly that it was not.

Even sleep, which I greatly needed, and for which I earnestly longed, did not come to me easily; for each time that I seemed to be dropping gently away into unconsciousness I would be roused by the feeling that I was holding fast to the chain again, and so was sliding down the long curve among the shadows, with the great walls of the canon towering infinitely above me, and with the black depth below. And in my sleep I made again the dreadful passage, and heard the clinking of the chain as it parted, and the rattle of it as it struck the rocks, and felt the grasp of Rayburn as he caught me, just as the bar was twitched out of my hands—and so woke to find Young shaking me, and to hear him say: "There's no earthly sense in your kickin' around that way, Professor; an', anyhow, it's time t' get up. It's just a wonder how these Mexican mornin's put life into a man. Why, there's a freshness in th' air that's goin' t' waste in this canon that's fit t' make a coffin stand right up on end an' dance a jig!"

Even Fray Antonio, but for the soreness of his hurt, felt strong and well; and we ate another tin of meat—which was much less than we wanted to eat—and so started along the path hewn out of the side of the cliff; and what with the brightness and joyfulness of the morning, we certainly were in much higher spirits than was at all reasonable in the case of men who had had such close companionship with Death so short a time before, and who still stood a very fair chance of dying dismally of starvation. The knowledge that, by the falling of the chain, our retreat had been again cut off did not at all trouble us. Even could we have crossed the canon, and so have retraced our steps, we could have gone no farther than the valley of the lake; and we could as well die here as there. And we were stayed by the reasonable conviction that the path which we were travelling upon certainly would lead us out of the mountains at last—even if it did not lead us to the hidden city that we sought.

For five or six miles we doubled on our course of the day before, going back along the canon and seeing the path that we had followed a little below us on the other side; then, by a very easy grade, our course began to ascend, and went on rising until the other path was so far below us that it ceased to be distinguishable. Thus we came to within a few hundred feet of the top of the cliffs, when a sudden turn to the left carried us into a narrow cleft in the rock. Here the path was very sharply inclined upward for a little way; and for the remainder of the distance to the top we ascended a long series of rudely cut steps, so steep that our legs fairly cracked under us as we neared the end of them.

But we forgot our weariness as we came out upon the summit at last, and a great view of clouds and mountain peaks burst upon us; the like of which I never have seen approached save by the view out over the Gunnison country from the crest of the Marshall Pass. But here we saw all around us what there is seen only in one direction; for we were on a vastly high, square crest—very like that called the Gigante, which the traveller by the Mexican Central Railroad sees to the left as he nears Silao—and clouds and mountain peaks rose up about us on every side.

But we did not long contemplate this heroic landscape, for a cloud, which almost enveloped us as we finished our ascent of the stair, was swept still farther away by the brisk wind then blowing; so that suddenly a vast building loomed largely through the flying vapor, and in a moment was clear and distinct before our eyes. To find upon this bare mountain-top, among cloud solitudes so profound as these, such overpowering evidence of the labor and strength of man, sent thrilling through our breasts a wonder that was akin to awe. It seemed unreal, impossible, that in such a place such work could be accomplished; and the very tangible reality of it made it seem to me one of those prodigies of man's creation which old stories tell of as having been wrought by a league with the devil and at the cost of a human soul.

Had there been any signs at all of human life about this solemn and majestic building, or upon the mountain-top whereon it stood, the chilling hold that it took upon our imaginations would have been less strong. What wrought upon us was the deadly silence, and the absolute stillness of everything save the drifting clouds. It seemed to us as though we had come out from the living world and our own time into a dead region belonging to a long dead past; and I remembered with a shudder that we had entered this region through that gloomy cavern, where hundreds of the ancient dead were clustered in silent worship about the great silent idol carved in everlasting stone. It seemed as though some evil spell hung over us, that doomed us forever to wander in wild solitudes—which were the more appalling because constantly uprose before us tangible evidence of the strong current of eager human life that had pulsed through them in former times. Young but put into his own rough language the thought that was in all our hearts when he declared, with a great oath, that for the sake of getting safe out of this lonely hole he'd contract to fight Indians three days in every week for the rest of his life, and be glad to do it for the comfort of having somebody around who was alive.



XVI.

AT THE BARRED PASS.

The whole top of the mountain, near a mile square, had been so levelled by nature that little remained to be done for its further smoothing by the hand of man. But the amount of work that had gone into the mere preparation for the building of the great temple was almost incredible. In the centre of the plateau a pyramidal mass of rock near a thousand feet square, of a piece with the mountain itself, had been so shaped and hewn that it rose in three great terraces to the square apex on which the temple stood. These terraces slanted upward, surrounding the pyramid by a continuously ascending way that had its beginning and its ending in the centre of the eastern front—so that, allowing for the diminishing size of the pyramid, the distance by this way from the bottom to the top of it was more than a mile and a half.

"It just took a slow-goin', lazy heathen Greaser t' think out a thing like this," Young observed as we went up the path. "Now, if th' Congregationalists that I was brought up among had put a church on a place like this—an' they wouldn't have been likely t' be fools enough t' do anything of th' sort—they'd 'a' had a set of steps runnin' smack from th' bottom t' th' top, an' folks would have got up in no time. It's just th' Greaser fashion all over t' spend a hundred years or so in makin' a path five miles long around a hill about as high as th' Boston State-house, so's they can get up it easy an' save their wind. But I wish they'd put in drinkin' fountains along th' road. I'm as thirsty as a salt cod—an' there's so precious little water left in th' keg that I'm afraid t' begin at it for fear of suckin' it all up."

"Drinking fountains?" Rayburn, who was a little in advance, called back to us. "Well, so they did. Come along and drink as much as you want to."

"Cut that, Rayburn," Young answered. "I'm too dead in earnest about my being thirsty to stand any foolin'."

"I'm not fooling"—we had caught up with him by this time—"look for yourself."

To which Young's only reply was to spring forward eagerly and drink a long deep draught from a stone basin beside the path into which trickled a tiny stream from above. Finding water in this unlikely place was as great a surprise as it was a joy to us; for we all longed for it, yet dared not drink freely because our supply was nearly gone. It was touching to hear the long sigh of happiness that El Sabio gave when at last he lifted his dripping snout out of the basin; and then to see the look that he gave Pablo, as though to thank him for so blessedly plentiful a drink. In truth, the Wise One had not tasted a drop of water for nearly twenty-four hours—not since his perilous passage of the canon—and his throat, and his poor little inside generally, must have been very dry.

When we came out on the top of the pyramid at last, which at that moment was wrapped in clouds almost as dense as London fog, we perceived the ingenious plan that had been adopted in order to secure water plentifully on this mountain-top. By careful scoring of the rock with many little channels, all leading to a cistern that seemed to be of great dimensions, the warm vapor of the clouds as it condensed into water on touching the chill stone surface was captured and safely stored away. And from the overflow of the cistern the fountain below was fed.

But we did not stop to examine very carefully into this matter, so eager were we to press on to the temple close before us. This stood upon a terraced platform, cut from the living rock, and was a perfectly plain structure—with walls slightly receding inward as they rose, and wholly destitute of ornamentation. For its majestic effect it depended upon its great size and upon its admirable proportions; and being built of the dark rock of which the mountain was formed, and having about it much of the sombre feeling that characterizes Egyptian architecture, it had an air of great solemnity and gloom.

In silence we ascended the short flight of steps that led to the broad, doorless entrance—the only opening through the massive walls—and so came into the vast shadowy hall that these great walls enclosed. From front to back of this hall extended many rows of stone pillars—like the single row found in the great chamber among the ruins of Mitla—and by these were upheld the huge slabs of stone of which the roof was made. Far away from where we stood, down at the end of a long vista of pillars, was a stone altar on which was carved in stone a colossal figure of the god Chac-Mool. Looking back through the open entrance, I saw a break in the mountain peaks to the eastward; and so perceived that the first rays of the rising sun must needs enter here and strike full upon the disk that was poised in the figure's hands. As Pablo caught sight of the great idol recumbent there, a momentary shudder went through him and he made certain motions with his hand before his eyes that were strange to me.

As we drew near to the altar we found that in front of it was a sacrificial stone, still darkly stained where blood had flowed upon it; and beneath the stone neck-yoke, still resting there, was a withered remnant of human vertebrae. There was something very ghastly in finding—preserved by the very stone that had held him down while life was let out of him—this mere scrap of the last human victim who had perished here. As in the desolate valley, so also on this desolate mountain-top, the only proof that human life ever had been here was found in proof of human death.

Save that our curiosity was gratified, and the blessing of the water which we found, our ascent of the great pyramid and our examination of the temple bore no fruit. Young, who still seemed to think that tilting up and disclosing secret passages was an attribute of all statues of the god Chac-Mool, was here again convinced that his generalization from a single case was not a sound one. In a serious way—that in itself would have been laughable but for the gloom of our surroundings—he climbed upon the altar and sat first on the head of the god, and then on his feet, and even tried the effect of seating himself upon the stone disk that the god upheld above his navel. But through all of these experiments the stone figure remained solidly immovable.

"I guess there was only one o' that tippin' kind," Young said, at last, "an' he sort o' flocked by himself. Let's get out of here, anyway. If this ever was the Aztec bank that we're lookin' for, there must have been a prehistoric run on it that cleaned it out. They must have done that sort o' thing in old times, eh, Professor? But it don't make much difference to us now what they did or what they didn't; an' we'd better fill up with water an' get out—that is, if there is any way of gettin' out except along the way we came. There's no good in goin' back that way. It would be better t' settle down here an' starve comfortably without wearin' out shoe-leather doin' it. But I don't mean t' do that until I've had a look all around th' top of this god-forsaken mountain, an' made sure that there's only one way down."

My own thoughts had been dwelling on the possibility that Young's words expressed; for at this definite point to which we had come, the path that we had come by very reasonably might end—so leaving us in this lonely region among the clouds to die slowly for lack of food. And there was a certain fitness in our having made our way so far among the dead only ourselves to die that added sombre fancies to our environment of sombre realities. Yet there was a heartiness in Young's resolutely expressed determination to search for a way out of our difficulties before at all yielding to them that insensibly cheered me. His words had a plucky ring to them; and bravery is as catching as is fear.

Our empty water-kegs were at the bottom of the pyramid, and when we reached the fountain on our downward way we waited there while Pablo went on with El Sabio and fetched them up to us. There was at least solid comfort in knowing, as we went on downward with the kegs all filled, that, whatever other death might come to us, at least we could not die of thirst. At the bottom of the pyramid we left Fray Antonio and Pablo, with El Sabio and the packs, and the three of us set out to explore the three sides of the mountain-top that were unknown to us in search of a downward path. A heavy mass of clouds had drifted over the mountain again, so thick that at a rod away all was white mist around us; and the light was growing faint, for the day had come nearly to an end. Indeed, had we been upon the lower levels of the earth night would have been already upon us.

Making my way along the edge of the precipice, where the plateau broke sheer off, was ticklish work; and half humorous, half melancholy thoughts went through my mind touching the absurdity of an ex-professor of Topical Linguistics in the University of Michigan being thus employed in path-hunting upon a lonely mountain-top in Mexico. Truly, adversity brings us strange bedfellows; but far stranger are the straits into which a man comes who takes up with the study of archaeology at first-hand. But my path-hunting was without result, for nowhere along the edge of the plateau was there a break fit for the descent of any creature save such as had wings. At the end of near an hour the clouds once more lifted; and then I saw Rayburn coming towards me, but with a serious look upon his face that told that he also had been unsuccessful in his search.

"It has rather a bad look, Professor," he said, briefly, when I had told him that along all the face of the mountain that I had examined the rock went down sheer. He filled his pipe and lighted it, and we walked back to the base of the pyramid in silence, while he smoked. Young had not returned; but presently we heard a shout that had so hopeful a sound in it as to start us both to our feet and forth to meet him.

"Have you found a way down?" Rayburn called, as he came nearer to us.

"You bet I have," he called back; "and, what's more, I've seen somethin' to eat."

"Seen something!" Rayburn answered, as he joined us. "Why the dickens didn't you get it?"

"Well, because it was better'n a mile away from me. It looked like a mountain sheep, as well as I could make out; but there it was for sure; an' thinkin' how good that critter will taste roasted has given me a regular twistin' pain all through my empty inside! But th' point is that down on that side o' th' mountain there's game; I saw birds, too, but I couldn't make out what they were; an', somehow, it looks different down there. It don't look like these d—n dead places we've been prowlin' through for more'n a coon's age. It looks as if God remembered it, an' it was alive! Why, th' very smell that came up had somethin' good about it; an' there was a different taste to th' air. I tell you, Rayburn, I didn't know what a lonely an' mis'rable an' lost chump sort of a way I was in until I looked over there into that place where th' whole business ain't run by dead folks. An' what's more, Professor, that's the trail for us; for, right where it starts down, there's th' King's symbol an' th' arrow, all reg'lar, blazed on th' rock."