“This made my friend all the more anxious to see what might be there, and he announced his intention of making the journey in the morning. He did so, but he had to go alone, for, during the night, his guide deserted him.”
“And what did he find at the mountain?” asked Bob. “A gold mine?”
“Not exactly,” replied the professor.
“Maybe it was a silver lode,” suggested Nestor. “There’s plenty of silver in Mexico.”
“It wasn’t a silver mine, either,” went on the professor. “All he found was a big hole in the side of the mountain. He went inside and walked for nearly a mile, his only light being a candle. Then he came to a wall of rock. He was about to turn back, when he noticed an opening in the wall. It was high up, but he built a platform of stones up and peered through the opening.”
“What did he see?” asked Jerry.
“The remains of an ancient, buried city,” replied Professor Snodgrass. “The mountain was nothing more than a big mound of earth, with an opening in the top, through which daylight entered. The shaft through the side led to the edge of the city. My friend gazed in on the remains of a place thousands of years old. The buildings were mostly in ruins, but they showed they had once been of great size and beauty. There were wide streets with what had been fountains in them. There was not a vestige of a living creature. It was as if some pestilence had fallen on the place and the people had all left.”
“Did he crawl through the hole in the wall and go into the deserted city?” asked Nestor, with keen interest.
“He wanted to,” answered the naturalist, “but he thought it would be risky, alone as he was. So he made a rough map of as much of the place as he could see, including his route in traveling to the mountain. Then he retraced his steps, intending to organize a searching party of scientists and examine the buried city.”