IT WAS THE LAST WORSHIP OF THE PRIEST OF CAY.
Page [253].
Janson and I made the ascent with some of the crew and made examination of the spot. We got up some timbers and a tarpaulin or two and soon arranged an excellent series of little cabins, sufficient to house the whole party if the need arose. We transported up to this eyrie a certain proportion of our provisions and stores, arranged hammocks for ourselves and cots for the ladies, and then felt that we had a satisfactory alternative abode if the ship should fail us.
This being accomplished, we had time and opportunity to turn to less pressing matters. We set forth on the following morning therefore to investigate the matter of the Mayan temple beneath the glacier, anent which Lessaution had muttered many jealous words during the last six or seven days. For he openly declared that Gerry and I wished to keep the glory of this discovery intact, and were delaying his entrance into its mysteries of malice prepense.
We took our ropes, poles, and a ladder to the cliff-top, found the crevasse, which we had marked with a cross hewn in the ice, and according to promise lowered the Frenchman first therein. I followed him, and in due order came Gerry, Denvarre, and Garlicke.
I found the little Professor trotting round the temple, exclamations of wonder and delight hurtling from between his teeth. His little arms waved, his little lean face beamed with scientific glee. His self-made dictionary and his grammar of the Mayan symbols was in his hands. In the pauses of his ecstasy he was trying to divine the inscriptions. Now and again he stopped to examine the prone figures of the shrivelled priests, turning them about and picking at them with a minuteness that struck me as both hard-hearted and indelicate. Finally he dragged himself out of this haphazard abandon of discovery, and settling down before the base of the great pedestal, began to decipher the inscriptions with serious attention.
For some few minutes he sat silently between Gerry and myself, who held candles by him. He conned the twisted devices, turning from them to his note-book, and tracing out each symbol carefully. Suddenly signs of the greatest excitement manifested themselves. He jumped up with an exclamation, nearly upsetting both of us, and rushed round to the back of the image. Here he began to butt at the solid stone in a manner that seemed little short of imbecile.
In the midst of these scrabblings a panel—as it seemed—gave beneath his hand; we stared wonderingly as a door slid open at his very feet.
Two steps were revealed, dropping down into a chamber in the stone. Into the blackness of this vault our friend flung himself, chattering furiously in French, without waiting to be offered a light. We only stayed for an additional candle to be lit and then followed him smartly.
It was a small dark room, and without exit to the air save by the way we had entered. Round the sides of rock-hewn wall ran a slab. Upon it were arranged various basons, salvers, spits, and other sacrificial instruments to which we could give neither names nor use. But what made our eyes sparkle and our breath come short and ecstatically, was the fact that each and all of these outlandish vessels shone yellow and lustrous in the candle-light. They were in no degree discolored by age or by damp. At the which we knew that here indeed we had fallen upon the Mayan booty of which my uncle had spoken—“the ancestral treasures of that hapless race.”