"And if we wait," I returned, "they will send back messengers to guide the Awataba here by some other trail. Perhaps they have already done so."
"True," she agreed coolly. "Well, so far I have planned for you. It is time you took thought to save yourselves."
I translated this to the others, and Peter strode instantly to an enormous boulder, lying on its side in a bed of shale.
"We put a cork in der bottle," he announced.
He leaned his shoulder against the boulder, heaved and it rolled over toward the head of the funnel. Another heave and another, and it rested on the funnel's lip. Peter shoved it with his right arm, there was a shower of gravel, a startled yelp from the bowels of the rocks, and he turned to us, with a broad grin.
"Ja, dot's a goodt——"
I thought the end of the world had come. Deep underneath there was a heavy jar, then a sullen, sky-piercing roar that resounded and reëchoed, pounding our ears, dazing our senses, louder, ever louder, swelling and bursting into prodigious thunder-peals. A dense cloud of dust rose like a curtain around us. The rock on which we stood jumped as though it had been struck with the hammer of a god. The roar slid off into a declining repetition of earth-shocks. The dust settled slowly. And we looked from a sheer precipice at our feet upon what had been Homolobi.
Peter's boulder, bounding down the funnel in the cliff, must have encountered a fault in the rock, possibly the jagged crack I had noted above the first funnel, and with the momentum it had gathered and its accompanying wave of small stones and gravel, had started forces which had torn from the face of the cliff the overhanging projection which had shielded Homolobi from attack for centuries. This mass, in falling, had planed off the top of the Breast, and was now a sloping hill of rock fragments which stretched far into the valley.
Under it lay the people and the houses of Homolobi, their storehouses and choicest gardens and most of the Awataba, who had gathered close to the foot of the Breast to await the issue of their demands. It was the most utter, tragic ruin I have ever seen. The dust clouds seethed above the wreckage like the smoke of successful fires, but no fires could have been so successful. There were not left even ruins or ashes. Homolobi was abolished. It was gone without a trace to show where it had been.
Kachina cast herself at Tawannears' feet.