As it fell, the rope tautened with a jerk that fetched an involuntary grunt from Henry’s suddenly constricted chest. Slowly, he arose out of the quicksand, his progress being accompanied by loud sucking reports as the sand reluctantly released him. But, when he cleared the surface, the boulder so outweighed him that he shot shoreward across the crust until directly under the purchase above, when the boulder came to rest on the ground beside him.
Only Francis’ head, arms, and tops of shoulders were visible above the quicksand when the end of the rope was flung to him. And, when he stood beside them on terra firma, and when he shook his fist at the quicksand he had escaped by so narrow a shave, they joined with him in deriding it. And a myriad ghosts derided them back, and all the air about them was woven by whispering shuttles into an evil texture of mockery.
CHAPTER XIV
“We can’t be a million miles away from it,” Henry said, as the trio came to pause at the foot of a high steep cliff. “If it’s any farther on, then the course lies right straight over the cliff, and, since we can’t climb it and from the extent of it it must be miles around, the source of those flashes ought to be right here.”
“Now could it have been a man with looking-glasses?” Leoncia ventured.
“Most likely some natural phenomenon,” Francis answered. “I’m strong on natural phenomena since those barking sands.”
Leoncia, who chanced to be glancing along the face of the cliff farther on, suddenly stiffened with attention and cried, “Look!”
Their eyes followed hers, and rested on the same point. What they saw was no flash, but a steady persistence of white light that blazed and burned like the sun. Following the base of the cliff at a scramble, both men remarked, from the density of vegetation, that there had been no travel of humans that way in many years. Breathless from their exertions, they broke out through the brush upon an open-space where a not-ancient slide of rock from the cliff precluded the growth of vegetable life.
Leoncia clapped her hands. There was no need for her to point. Thirty feet above, on the face of the cliff, were two huge eyes. Fully a fathom across was each of the eyes, their surfaces brazen with some white reflecting substance.
“The eyes of Chia!” she cried.
Henry scratched his head with sudden recollection.
“I’ve a shrewd suspicion I can tell you what they’re composed of,” he said. “I’ve never seen it before, but I’ve heard old-timers mention it. It’s an old Maya trick. My share of the treasure, Francis, against a perforated dime, that I can tell you what the reflecting stuff is.”
“Done!” cried Francis. “A man’s a fool not to take odds like that, even if it’s a question of the multiplication table. Possibly millions of dollars against a positive bad dime! I’d bet two times two made five on the chance that a miracle could prove it. Name it? What is it? The bet is on.”
“Oysters,” Henry smiled. “Oyster shells, or, rather, pearl-oyster shells. It’s mother-of-pearl, cunningly mosaicked and cemented in so as to give a continuous reflecting surface. Now you have to prove me wrong, so climb up and see.”
Beneath the eyes, extending a score of feet up and down the cliff, was a curious, triangular out-jut of rock. Almost was it like an excrescence on the face of the cliff. The apex of it reached within a yard of the space that intervened between the eyes. Rough inequalities of surface, and cat-like clinging on Francis’ part, enabled him to ascend the ten feet to the base of the excrescence. Thence, up to the ridge of it, the way was easier. But a twenty-five-foot fall and a broken arm or leg in the midst of such isolation was no pleasant thing to consider, and Leoncia, causing an involuntary jealous gleam to light Henry’s eyes, called up:
“Oh, do be careful, Francis!”
Standing on the tip of the triangle he was gazing, now into one, and then into the other, of the eyes. He drew his hunting knife and began to dig and pry at the right-hand eye.
“If the old gentleman were here he’d have a fit at such sacrilege,” Henry commented.
“The perforated dime is yours,” Francis called down, at the same time dropping into Henry’s outstretched palm the fragment he had dug loose.
Mother-of-pearl it was, a flat piece cut with definite purpose to fit in with the many other pieces to form the eye.
“Where there’s smoke there’s fire,” Henry adjudged. “Not for nothing did the Mayas select this God-forsaken spot and stick these eyes of Chia on the cliff.”
“Looks as if we’d made a mistake in leaving the old gentleman and his sacred knots behind,” Francis said.
“The knots should tell all about it and what our next move should be.”
“Where there are eyes there should be a nose,” Leoncia contributed.
“And there is!” exclaimed Francis. “Heavens! That was the nose I just climbed up. We’re too close up against it to have perspective. At a hundred yards’ distance it would look like a colossal face.”
Leoncia advanced gravely and kicked at a decaying deposit of leaves and twigs evidently blown there by tropic gales.
“Then the mouth ought to be where a mouth belongs, here under the nose,” she said.
In a trice Henry and Francis had kicked the rubbish aside and exposed an opening too small to admit a man’s body. It was patent that the rock-slide had partly blocked the way. A few rocks heaved aside gave space for Francis to insert his head and shoulders and gaze about with a lighted match.
“Watch out for snakes,” warned Leoncia.
Francis grunted acknowledgment and reported:
“This is no natural cavern. It’s all hewn rock, and well done, if I’m any judge.” A muttered expletive announced the burning of his fingers by the expiring match-stub. And next they heard his voice, in accents of surprise: “Don’t need any matches. It’s got a lighting system of its own——from somewhere above——regular concealed lighting, though it’s daylight all right. Those old Mayas were certainly some goers. Wouldn’t be surprised if we found an elevator, hot and cold water, a furnace, and a Swede janitor.—Well, so long.”
His trunk, and legs, and feet disappeared, and then his voice issued forth:
“Come on in. The cave is fine.”
“And now aren’t you glad you let me come along?” Leoncia twitted, as she joined the two men on the level floor of the rock-hewn chamber, where, their eyes quickly accustoming to the mysterious gray-percolation of daylight, they could see about them with surprising distinctness. “First, I found the eyes for you, and, next, the mouth. If I hadn’t been along, most likely, by this time, you’d have been half a mile away, going around the cliff and going farther and farther every step you took.
“But the place is bare as old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard,” she added, the next moment.
“Naturally,” said Henry. “This is only the antechamber. Not so sillily would the Mayas hide the treasure the conquistadores were so mad after. I’m willing to wager right now that we’re almost as far from finding the actual treasure as we would be if we were not here but in San Antonio.”
Twelve or fifteen feet in width and of an unascertainable height, the passage led them what Henry judged forty paces, or well over a hundred feet. Then it abruptly narrowed, turned at a right angle to the right, and, with a similar right angle to the left, made an elbow into another spacious chamber.
Still the mysterious percolation of daylight guided the way for their eyes, and Francis, in the lead, stopped so suddenly that Leoncia and Henry, in a single file behind, collided with him. Leoncia in the center, and Henry on her left, they stood abreast and gazed down a long avenue of humans, long dead, but not dust.
“Like the Egyptians, the Mayas knew embalming and mummifying,” Henry said, his voice unconsciously sinking to a whisper in the presence of so many unburied dead, who stood erect and at gaze, as if still alive.
All were European-clad, and all exposed the impassive faces of Europeans. About them, as to the life, were draped the ages-rotten habiliments of the conquistadores and of the English pirates. Two of them, with visors raised, were encased in rusty armor. Their swords and cutlasses were belted to them or held in their shriveled hands, and through their belts were thrust huge flintlock pistols of archaic model.
“The old Maya was right,” Francis whispered. “They’ve decorated the hiding place with their mortal remains and been stuck up in the lobby as a warning to trespassers.—Say! If that chap isn’t a real Iberian! I’ll bet he played haia-lai, and his fathers before him.”
“And that’s a Devonshire man if ever I saw one,” Henry whispered back. “Perforated dimes to pieces-of-eight that he poached the fallow deer and fled the king’s wrath in the first forecastle for the Spanish Main.”
“Br-r-r!” Leoncia shivered, clinging to both men. “The sacred things of the Mayas are deadly and ghastly. And there is a classic vengeance about it. The would-be robbers of the treasure-house have become its defenders, guarding it with their unperishing clay.”
They were loath to proceed. The garmented spectres of the ancient dead held them temporarily spell-bound. Henry grew melodramatic.
“Even to this far, mad place,” he said, “as early as the beginning of the Conquest, their true-hound noses led them on the treasure-scent. Even though they could not get away with it, they won unerringly to it.—My hat is off to you, pirates and conquistadores! I salute you, old gallant plunderers, whose noses smelt out gold, and whose hearts were brave sufficient to fight for it!”
“Huh!” Francis concurred, as he urged the other two to traverse the avenue of the ancient adventurers. “Old Sir Henry himself ought to be here at the head of the procession.”
Thirty paces they took, ere the passage elbowed as before, and, at the very end of the double-row of mummies, Henry brought his companions to a halt as he pointed and said:
“I don’t know about Sir Henry, but there’s Alvarez Torres.”
Under a Spanish helmet, in decapitated medieval Spanish dress, a big Spanish sword in its brown and withered hand, stood a mummy whose lean brown face for all the world was the lean brown face of Alvarez Torres. Leoncia gasped, shrank back, and crossed herself at the sight.
Francis released her to Henry, advanced, and fingered the cheeks and lips and forehead of the thing, and laughed reassuringly:
