I was looking along a platform, on which ten skeletons were disposed at full length, with the skulls still covered with long hair, and the fleshless limbs glimmering white and stretching back into the darkness.
On the right hand, and crouching between a skeleton and the wall of the chamber (what we had taken for a roof was the floor of a room raised on pillars), I saw the form of a man. He was dressed in gay colours, and, as he sat with his legs drawn up, his arms rested on his knees.
On the first beholding of a dreadful thing, our instinct forces us to rush against it, as if to bring the horror to the test of touch. This instinct wakened in me. For a moment I felt dazed, and then I continued to stare involuntarily at the watcher of the dead. He had not stirred. My eyes became accustomed to the dim and flickering light which the lantern cast in that dark place.
“Hold on, Peter,” I cried, and leaped down to the floor of the cave.
“It’s all right, Moore,” I said. “Don’t you remember the picture in old Lafitau’s ‘Mœurs des Sauvages Américains’? We are in a burying-place of the Cherouines, and the seated man is only the kywash, ‘which is an image of woode keeping the deade.’”
“Ass that I am!” cried Moore. “I knew the cave led us from the Sachem’s Cave to the Sachem’s Mound, and I forgot for a moment how the fellows disposed of their dead. We must search the platform. Peter, make a ladder again.”
Moore mounted nimbly enough this time. I followed him.
The kywash had no more terrors for us, and we penetrated beyond the fleshless dead into the further extremity of the sepulchre. Here we lifted and removed vast piles of deerskin bags, and of mats, filled as they were with “the dreadful dust that once was man.” As we reached the bottom of the first pile something glittered yellow and bright beneath the lantern.
Moore stooped and tried to lift what looked like an enormous plate. He was unable to raise the object, still weighed down as it was with the ghastly remnants of the dead. With feverish haste we cleared away the débris, and at last lifted and brought to light a huge and massive disk of gold, divided into rays which spread from the centre, each division being adorned with strange figures in relief—figures of animals, plants, and what looked like rude hieroglyphs.
This was only the firstfruits of the treasure.