“Anyway,” Jimmie answered with a grin, “I knew there ought to be a secret passage somewhere. Where do you suppose the old thing leads to?”
“For one thing,” Carl answered, “it probably leads under the great stone slab in front of the entrance, because when Miguel, the foxy boy with the red and blue lights, disappeared he went down into the ground right there. And I’ll bet,” he went on, “that it runs out to the rocky elevation to the west and connects with the forest near where the machine is.”
“Those old chaps must have burrowed like rabbits!” declared Jimmie.
“Don’t you think the men who operated the temples ever carried the stones which weigh a hundred tons or cut passages through solid rocks!” Carl declared. “They worked the Indians for all that part of the game, just as the Egyptians worked the Hebrews on the lower Nile.”
“Well, the only way to find out where it goes,” Jimmie suggested, “is to follow it. We can’t stand here and guess it out.”
“Indeed we can’t,” agreed Carl. “I’ll go on down the incline and you follow along. Looks pretty slippery here, so we’d better keep close together. I don’t suppose we can put the stone back,” he added with a parting glance into the chamber.
“What would we want to put it back for?” demanded Jimmie.
“How do we know who will be snooping around here while we are under ground?” Carl asked impatiently. “If some one should come along here and stuff the stone back into the hole and we shouldn’t be able to find any exit, we’d be in a nice little tight box, wouldn’t we?”
“Well, if we can’t lift it back into the hole,” Jimmie argued, “I guess we can push it along in front of us. This incline seems slippery enough to pass it along like a sleighload of girls on a snowy hill.”
The boys concentrated their strength, which was not very great at that time because of their wounds, on the stone and were soon gratified to see it sliding swiftly out of sight along a dark incline.