The valley of Arcana

by Arthur Preston Hankins

The result was that he had left a monument to his diligence and sound constructive principles, and it gave promise of a sheltered home for Charmian.

She noted most of the details when she had found an ancient notched pole and used it as a ladder to climb to the entrance in the roof. Shonto had explained the construction of these huts to her, so she knew how to go about getting into the seemingly doorless hovel. There was not much earth left on the sloping sides, but the straight, peeled redwood logs were close together, and the cracks between were narrow ones.

The light filtering in between these cracks revealed the interior as she clung to the top of the crude ladder and looked down through the hole.

As she had shudderingly expected, the first things that she saw were human skeletons, yellow rather than bleached, on the stone floor below her. The notched pole of the interior had broken off at the middle, and the two parts, old and decayed, lay prone. She dreaded to enter, but she thought that she must find a better refuge than the broad, unprotected outdoors. There probably were mountain lions in the valley, and maybe grizzlies were not altogether extinct in this remote region. She sat astride the upper ends of the logs and contrived to drag her notched pole up the side and lower it through the hole. To live in there she must remove the skeletons, and she dreaded to touch them as she had never before dreaded anything in her life.

She clambered down to the rock bench surrounding the hole. She crawled over the edge and lowered herself backward into the five-foot pit. There were three skeletons, the bones of which were unscattered. Dry, brown skin clung to them, wrinkled and harder than a drum-head. Mats of black hair had slipped from the skulls and made cushions under them. With a feeling of deep repugnance she set about her inevitable task and began lifting the dry bones to the bench above. Many of them she later was able to pitch through the hole in the roof, to hear them clattering down the redwood logs to the ground outside. Larger portions that persisted in hanging together she laboriously carried to the top and dropped.

When this disagreeable task had been finished she gave more attention to the interior.

Dirt had sifted in, of course, and the stone floor was partially covered with it. Rain also would enter at every crack and settle in a pool in the rocky pit. She wondered if, when the hut was in shape, the earth thrown over it had kept it dry. If it were to snow before it rained, she thought, the snow covering might be effective in that respect. She knew that Eskimos lived in huts of snow, but she did not know what held them up.

She found red pottery, crude and interesting—water ollas and great bowls and smaller dishes. She found a skin garment, well tanned and well preserved. It had been inlaid with brilliant duck scalps, the greater part of which had succumbed to the erosive hand of time. She found nose rings and goose-quill ornaments and arrowheads of flint and obsidian and a bowl-shaped basketwork cap which once had been adorned with the bright feathers of woodpeckers and jays, for the remnants of them lay all about it. There were elk-horn knives and hatchets and awls of the sharpened bones of mule deer. And on a slab of bone, taken from the skeleton of some large animal and cut square, she found a crude carving unmistakably depicting the rather revolting episode of a woman vomiting up a frog.

She forgot her troubles, digging in the dirt for more relics with the primitive tools of the dead. She found a fish spear with a yew-wood shaft and a head of volcanic glass—a veritable treasure. She did not notice the darkening of the hut as the ephemeral winter sun sank swiftly nearer to the saw-tooth cliffs that towered about the Valley of Arcana. Then of a sudden almost no light at all streamed in through the cracks, and the hut was dark and cold. She shuddered, scrambled to the bench, climbed the notched pole as hurriedly as possible, and, not stopping to drag it out after her, slid down the sloping side and landed in a heap on the ground.

Twilight had come. Night would follow soon, with the tall cliffs to shut off the last remnants of the sunlight from the valley. She hurried to her camp, spread her blankets, and pondered over what she would eat for supper.