Part 14

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 knew 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."