Adventure Magazine Cover — page 177: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

The Mahogany Garden In about ten minutes the three came to a little eminence and the cripple drew rein and pointed back. Not more than half a mile behind them was a large party of horsemen. Haskell studied them with his glasses. Don Felipe was leading all the others, his right arm bandaged roughly and bound across his chest, his two sons close behind him and a dozen mozos from the hacienda mounted on any sort of animal from an antiquated stallion to a female donkey in foal. ‘Let me see if I have forgotten the trick,”’ said Haskell, throwing open the carbine, replacing the firing-pin, throwing the bolt and taking careful aim. With the crack of the gun, the horse of the second son plunged headlong, sending his rider sprawling, and the whole column came to a halt. “This little thing is a wonder!” said Has- kell, gazing at the neglected piece with ad- miration, as they rode on. The trees and the undergrowth grew suddenly more dense. They had come to the belt cf soil that retained the moisture, and the tropical forest was begun. Save for the stifling closeness of the air it was a relief from the sun to get in under the inter- locking arms of the great giants woven together with festoons of creeping plants whose main stems were nearly as large as the trees themselves and whose farthest, newest tendrils would be hundreds of feet from the parent root. It is a popular idea that the tropical forest always teems with animal life. The truth is that there is far less than in the temperate zone, save in rare localities. The section through which the riders were now passing was silent and deserted, and after half anjhour the very sound of the horses’ hoofs seemed to become magnified to something enormous and dreadful. The little withered man begun to scan the way- side signs carefully, for the trail was grow- ing fainter, and at a point where it had branched he had taken the faintest of three paths. At last he halted before a veritable wall of creepers and parasitic plants at one side of the trail and, moving a part of the whole aside as a curtain, signed for Haskell to dismount and lead in his horse. To his amazement the engineer found him- self in an old machete-trimmed pathway now growing shut once more. For two hundred feet along this artificial path they made their way and came to a 741 veritable wall of growing tree trunks mat- ted with vines. Something in the set of it suggested to Haskell that it had been pur- posefully planted, like a hedge, and he said as much to the cripple, who smiled and nodded his head and said cryptically: “When a man lives in among the trees he must build his walls with them.” Twisting around this trunk, stooping under that one and squeezing between another two, they passed the living barrier and stood in a great circular place grown up with a thicket to the height of a man’s head. From the center rose a four-cornered mound at least ninety feet tall, and on the truncated top,embowered in great trees, was a broad stone building, with ruined sides, carved in beautiful, deeply cut designs. All along the face of the wall nearest to him was a row of darker stone on which Haskell made out successive figures of the Central American tiger. “El Iglesia del Tigre!” said the little old cripple, making a curious gesticulation with his withered hand. Haskell knew he was looking for the first time on one of tens of thousands of ruined buildings which dot the country from the Gulf of Mexico to the lakes of Nicaragua, bespeaking the life and death of a wonder- ful people, older than the Aztecs, even older than the Toltecs, perhaps even more an- cient than the Colhuans, and some say that these stone cities, often miles in extent, were teeming with the life of a highly civil- ized people long before the days of Babylon or the birth of the first Pharaoh. CHAPTER V THE TEMPLE OF THE TIGER aL engineer stood gazing at the strength and beauty of the architec- ture of the ruined building. The cripple watched him a moment with pleasure and then said: ““You see but one, and a little one, sefior. The white men have found Uxmal, Chichen- Itza, Palenque, Copan and the other great cities, but the others they have not seen. There are those through which the sefior must travel half the day to pass, even with- out looking, ah, for they are far greater. The trees have grown up to hide them since the Great Serpent took our people away, and the sefior might travel througha COMICOOOKKS. EO S|