“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:
“I only wish Alvarez Torres were as dead as this dead one is. I haven’t
the slightest doubt, however, but what Torres descended from him——I mean
before he came here to take up his final earthly residence as a member
of the Maya Treasure Guard.”
Leoncia passed the grim figure shudderingly. This time, the elbow
passage was very dark, compelling Henry, who had changed into the lead,
to light numerous matches.
“Hello!” he said, as he paused at the end of a couple of hundred feet.
“Gaze on that for workmanship! Look at the dressing of that stone!”
From beyond, gray light streamed into the passage, making matches
unnecessary to see. Half into a niche was thrust a stone the size of the
passage. It was apparent that it had been used to block the passage. The
dressing was exquisite, the sides and edges of the block precisely
aligned with the place in the wall into which it was made to dovetail.
“I’ll wager here’s where the old Maya’s father died,” Francis exclaimed.
“He knew the secret of the balances and leverages that pivoted the
stone, and it was only partly pivoted, as you’ll observe——”
“Hell’s bells!” Henry interrupted, pointing before him on the floor at a
scattered skeleton. “It must be what’s left of him. It’s fairly recent,
or he would have been mummified. Most likely he was the last visitor
before us.”
“The old priest said his father led men of the tierra caliente here,”
Leoncia reminded Henry.
“Also,” Francis supplemented, “he said that none returned.”
Henry, who had located the skull and picked it up, uttered another
exclamation and lighted a match to show the others what he had
discovered: Not only was the skull dented with what must have been a
blow from a sword or a machete, but a shattered hole in the back of the
skull showed the unmistakable entrance of a bullet. Henry shook the
skull, was rewarded by an interior rattling, shook again, and shook out
a partly flattened bullet. Francis examined it.
“From a horse-pistol,” he concluded aloud. “With weak or greatly
deteriorated powder, because, in a place like this, it must have been
fired pretty close to point blank range and yet failed to go all the way
through. And it’s an aboriginal skull all right.”
A right-angled turn completed the elbow and gave them access to a small
but well-lighted rock chamber. From a window, high up and barred with
vertical bars of stone a foot thick and half as wide, poured gray
daylight. The floor of the place was littered with white-picked bones of
men. An examination of the skulls showed them to be those of Europeans.
Scattered among them were rifles, pistols, and knives, with, here and
there, a machete.
“Thus far they won, across the very threshold to the treasure,” Francis
said, “and, from the looks, began to fight for its possession before
they laid hands on it. Too bad the old man isn’t here to see what
happened to his father.”
“Might there not have been survivors who managed to get away with the
loot?” suggested Henry.
But at that moment, casting, his eyes from the bones to a survey of the
chamber, Francis saw what made him say:
“Without doubt, no. See those gems in those eyes. Rubies, or I never saw
a ruby!”
They followed his gaze to the stone statue of a squat and heavy female
who stared at them red-eyed and open-mouthed. So large was the mouth
that it made a caricature of the rest of the face. Beside it, carved
similarly of stone, and on somewhat more heroic lines, was a more
obscene and hideous male statue, with one ear of proportioned size and
the other ear as grotesquely large as the female’s mouth.
“The beauteous dame must be Chia all right,” Henry grinned. “But who’s
her gentleman friend with the elephant ear and the green eyes?”
“Search me,” Francis laughed. “But this I do know: those green eyes of
the elephant-eared one are the largest emeralds I’ve ever seen or
dreamed of. Each of them is really too large to possess fair carat
value. They should be crown jewels or nothing.”
“But a couple of emeralds and a couple of rubies, no matter what size,
should not constitute the totality of the Maya treasure,” Henry
contended. “We’re across the threshold of it, and yet we lack the key——”
“Which the old Maya, back on the barking sands, undoubtedly holds in
that sacred tassel of his,” Leoncia said. “Except for these two statues
and the bones on the floor, the place is bare.”
As she spoke, she advanced to look the male statue over more closely.
The grotesque ear centered her attention, and she pointed into it as she
added: “I don’t know about the key, but there is the key-hole.”
True enough, the elephantine ear, instead of enfolding an orifice as an
ear of such size should, was completely blocked up save for a small
aperture that not too remotely resembled a key-hole. They wandered
vainly about the chamber, tapping the walls and floor, seeking for
cunningly-hidden passageways or unguessable clues to the hiding place of
the treasure.
“Bones of tierra caliente men, two idols, two emeralds of enormous size,
two rubies ditto, and ourselves, are all the place contains,” Francis
summed up. “Only a couple of things remain for us to do: go back and
bring up Ricardo and the mules to make camp outside; and bring up the
old gentleman and his sacred knots if we have to carry him.”
“You wait with Leoncia, and I’ll go back and bring them up,” Henry
volunteered, when they had threaded the long passages and the avenues of
the erect dead and won to the sunshine and the sky outside the face of
the cliff.
* * * * *
Back on the barking sands the peon and his father knelt in the circle so
noisily drawn by the old man’s forefinger. A local rain squall beat upon
them, and, though the peon shivered, the old man prayed on oblivious to
what might happen to his skin in the way of wind and water. It was
because the peon shivered and was uncomfortable that he observed two
things which his father missed. First, he saw Alvarez Torres and José
Mancheno cautiously venture out from the jungle upon the sand. Next, he
saw a miracle. The miracle was that the pair of them trudged steadily
across the sand without causing the slightest sound to arise from their
progress. When they had disappeared ahead, he touched his finger
tentatively to the sand, and aroused no ghostly whisperings. He thrust
his finger into the sand, yet all was silent, as was it silent when he
buffeted the sand heartily with the flat of his palm. The passing shower
had rendered the sand dumb.
He shook his father out of his prayers, announcing:
“The sand no longer is noisy. It is as silent as the grave. And I have
seen the enemy of the rich Gringo pass across the sand without sound. He
is not devoid of sin, this Alvarez Torres, yet did the sand make no
sound. The sand has died. The voice of the sand is not. Where the sinful
may walk, you and I, old father, may walk.”
Inside the circle, the old Maya, with trembling forefinger in the sand,
traced further cabalistic characters; and the sand did not shout back at
him. Outside the circle it was the same——because the sand had become
wet, and because it was the way of the sand to be vocal only when it was
bone-dry under the sun. He fingered the knots of the sacred writing
tassel.
“It says,” he reported, “that when the sand no longer talks it is safe
to proceed. So far I have obeyed all instruction. In order to obey
further instruction, let us now proceed.”
So well did they proceed, that, shortly beyond the barking sands, they
overtook Torres and Mancheno, which worthy pair slunk off into the brush
on one side, watched the priest and his son go by, and took up their
trail well in the rear. While Henry, taking a short cut, missed both
couples of men.