All-Story Weekly, Vol. 112, No. 1 — page 64: what you’re looking at

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

54 Nambe, whose tastes occasionally lay in that direction, strolled unobtrusively along with the party. Through some strange freemasonry with the Indians, the islander, though he understood hardly a dozen words of their language, usually was made ac- quainted with whatever was on foot; and his liberality with ‘his pocket-money made him a favorite. . Escorted by Tomas and Enrique, one of the Cholos who had been raised in the neighborhood, Katherine, Jones, and the Martian rode in the opposite direction. On the way Jones took occasion while Kelly was riding ahead to relate to Kather- ine Jim’s experience of the night before, an affair as mystifying to her as it had been to the two men. | As they proceeded, they found the valley narrower; at their right the brawling Rio Poccha cut more deeply in the rock, until its course was a quite respectable gorge, al- most a hundred feet deep; and above it the sheer walls of the valley towering to twice that height. Beyond an abrupt angle on the left side of the valley the wall was cleft by a deep and narrow rift, down which cascaded an- other turbulent stream to join the Poccha. On the farther side of the chasm which the age-old torrent had cut across the val- ley wag a high, triangular plateau a number of acres in extent, and virtually inaccessible either from above or below except by a stone bridge. On this plateau, and under it —for a large part of the ruins were sub- terranean—was the Castle of Chavin, stronghold of a former feudal lord of the Incas, now a frowning semicircle of weather- stained masonry enclosing a number of lone- ly, crumbling towers. The same hands which built the castle and its companion temple laid the bridge across the chasm; and how its flooring of single fifteen-foot slabs of stone was slung into place is a problem to which no latter- day engineer has offered the solution. At each side of the bridge were low walls of modern construction, terminating at the bridge-approaches in squat columns of ce- ment, also modern. But embedded in the cement of each pillar was a grotesque stone head several times life size, which had been ALL-STORY WEEKLY, found among the subterranean galleries of the sunken temple. Tomas tethered the mules to a clump of mountain-ash, and the visitors, not without a feeling of awe, crossed the ancient bridge and entered the main court of the castle by a massive portal whose timber gates long centuries before had moldered into dust. By clambering over heaps of débris on suc- cessive flights of steps, they reached the summits of the roofless towers, which offered a splendid view of the lower valley. “Truly these folk builded for all. time,” said the Martian, contemplating the solid walls, which, though laid without mortar or cement, had withstood perhaps six cen- turies of the attacks of time in a region of wild weather and not infrequent earth- quakes. Below, in a smaller inner court, Enrique showed the entrance to a miniature tunnel mined in the living rock, which somewhere farther up its course had once connected with the stream, and made Chavin secure against thirst in case of siege. _ Through Tomas, whose Spanish was not too far beyond Jones’s college attainments in the language, Enrique then volunteered to penetrate into the recesses of the under- ground temple and ascertain if it might be explored comfortably. He explained that at times the waters of the stream flowed into the sunken chambers and turned them into disagreeable cisterns. As there was both time and light for fur- ther explorations, the Indians having brought torches, Jones did not object. En- rique led the way to the ground-level por- tion of the temple, which they entered by a gateway little less massive than that in the outer wall, and which was so placed that it commanded a view of the other, and of the bridge beyond. Some of the pillars which had supported the azoteas or low roof of the structure still were standing. The others had fallen, and about their prostrate lengths lay the débris of the upper masonry which had crashed down with them. Through a tortuous pathway from which the rock fragments had been cleared, En- rique conducted the party to the brink of a circular pit or well, sunk in the temple cCoOmiclbooks C©