“Those pinnacles of rock are as sharp as needles. It would be like climbing broken glass. The climber would be cut to pieces before he had gone halfway. See,� we approached the wall closely and I pointed out to her how sharp the edges were. “If it were granite rock these ridges and splinters would be weatherworn and smooth, but this coral formation is of a different quality.�
“Then if we find no stairs we are in a bad situation,� she said thoughtfully, examining the towering wall.
“There must be stairs,� I answered, “or there must be some other way. The latitude and longitude agree with your ancestor’s description, and I make no doubt we shall chance upon them.�
“But if there are none?� she persisted.
“Doubtless we’ll find some break to let us up or in,� I answered easily, evasively it may be, but hopefully, not being minded to pass our existence on the narrow strip of sand on which we were walking.
So we tramped along, searching the shore and sea and finding nothing. After perhaps an hour’s monotonous going, when we had traversed about a third of the distance of the island, we rounded a projection of the cliff and there before us—rose the stairs!
Now I know that you who read will accuse me of fond invention, yet I have not the wit or the imagination of the romancer. I can only relate the facts as they were. What we saw was a gigantic stairway, irregular, but made of huge blocks of roughhewn stone—not coral rock, but harder stone of firmer texture, like granite almost. I was not familiar with the stone either. There was no symmetry about the stairs. Some of the stones rose perhaps three feet, and others not more than as many inches, but stairs they certainly were, and they surely had been made by man. The stones were most carefully fitted, being laid up without mortar, the joints so close that I could scarce thrust a knife blade between. The huge blocks were of monstrous size, too; much too great in bulk and weight to be handled by any but mechanical means. I never could conceive how natives or primitive men could have shaped them, moved them, and finally laid them up in the form of stairs. I have since made inquiries of learned men and find that for all their study they, too, are at sea as to who were those mighty builders and how they builded.
Nor did the stairs alone awaken our amazement and quicken our curiosity. They ended in the circling belt of sand, here a little wider than elsewhere. At the bottom on either side, two gigantic statues, or busts, of stone had been erected. Their bases were buried in the sand and they rose to quite twice my height above, and I am good six feet tall and more. These stones were carved into the rough yet not unreal likenesses of human faces. The carving had been done with marvelous skill considering, and the faces were not of the native type either. They were of our type, only distorted and exaggerated. The carving included the breast; one was a man, the other a woman. They were made of the same hard pinkish rock as the stairs, and the angles and projections upon them apparently had been softened and smoothed by hundreds of years of exposure to the weather. They were not unfamiliar to us either, for they were, making due allowance for size, just like the little image Sir Philip had brought back. They had the same enormous sightless eyes, the same long protruding jaws, the same hideous fang-like teeth, the same repulsive features. We looked at them both, experiencing a perfectly natural and understandable feeling of horror and disgust. One had lost his crown, but the other was intact as he had left the carver’s hands.
The very size of them intensified our disquiet. They were caricatures of course, but withal they were intensely natural and lifelike and not less wonderful than the stairs, over which for centuries they had been the silent watchers and guardians.
Certain I am that you will find it difficult to credit these marvels, and will dismiss them perhaps as a traveler’s idle tale, yet I have given you the latitude and longitude of the island and you may go there and see them for yourself if you desire, and you may perhaps find what treasure we left there, too, for a reward! When you return you can testify that I lie not, but speak the sober truth.