Again the soft contours of the rolling ground had been disturbed: a landslide in some other century had sent a torrent of boulders from the high slopes above. Harkness threaded his way among great masses of granite to come at last to an opening where massive monoliths formed a gateway.
It was an entrance to another valley. They did not need to enter, for they could skirt it and continue toward the high pass in the hills. But the gateway seemed inviting. Harkness took Diane's hand to help her toward it; the others followed.
The fast sinking sun had buried itself behind a distant range, and long shadows swept swiftly across the world, as if the oncoming night were alive—as if it were rousing from the somnolence of its daytime sleep and reaching out with black and clutching hands toward a fearful, waiting world.
"No twilight here," Chet observed; "let's find a hide-out—a cave, by choice—where we can guard the entrance and—"
A gasp from Diane checked him. "Oh!" she exclaimed. "It is not real! C'est impossible!"
Chet had been busied with the matter of a secure footing; he looked up now and took a step forward where Harkness and Diane stood motionless in a gateway of stone. And he, too, stopped as if stunned by the weird beauty of the scene.
A valley. Its length reached out before them to end some half mile away. Sides that might once have sloped evenly seemed weathered to a series of great steps, and an alternation of striations in black and white made a banding that encircled the entire oval. Each step was dead-black stone, each riser was snow-white marble; and the steps mounted up and up until they resembled the sides of a great bowl. In the center, like an altar for the worship of some wild, gargantuan god, was a stepped pyramid of the same startling black and white. Banded like the walls, it rose to half their height to finish in a capstone cut square and true.
An altar, perhaps; an arena, beyond a doubt, or so it seemed to Chet. He was first to put the impression in words.
"A stadium!" he marvelled; "an arena for the games of the gods!"