“Come on in. The cave is fine.”
“And now aren’t you glad you let me come along?” Leoncia twitted, as she joined the two men on the level floor of the rock-hewn chamber, where, their eyes quickly accustoming to the mysterious gray-percolation of daylight, they could see about them with surprising distinctness. “First, I found the eyes for you, and, next, the mouth. If I hadn’t been along, most likely, by this time, you’d have been half a mile away, going around the cliff and going farther and farther every step you took.
“But the place is bare as old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard,” she added, the next moment.
“Naturally,” said Henry. “This is only the antechamber. Not so sillily would the Mayas hide the treasure the conquistadores were so mad after. I’m willing to wager right now that we’re almost as far from finding the actual treasure as we would be if we were not here but in San Antonio.”
Twelve or fifteen feet in width and of an unascertainable height, the passage led them what Henry judged forty paces, or well over a hundred feet. Then it abruptly narrowed, turned at a right angle to the right, and, with a similar right angle to the left, made an elbow into another spacious chamber.
Still the mysterious percolation of daylight guided the way for their eyes, and Francis, in the lead, stopped so suddenly that Leoncia and Henry, in a single file behind, collided with him. Leoncia in the center, and Henry on her left, they stood abreast and gazed down a long avenue of humans, long dead, but not dust.
“Like the Egyptians, the Mayas knew embalming and mummifying,” Henry said, his voice unconsciously sinking to a whisper in the presence of so many unburied dead, who stood erect and at gaze, as if still alive.
All were European-clad, and all exposed the impassive faces of Europeans. About them, as to the life, were draped the ages-rotten habiliments of the conquistadores and of the English pirates. Two of them, with visors raised, were encased in rusty armor. Their swords and cutlasses were belted to them or held in their shriveled hands, and through their belts were thrust huge flintlock pistols of archaic model.
“The old Maya was right,” Francis whispered. “They’ve decorated the hiding place with their mortal remains and been stuck up in the lobby as a warning to trespassers.—Say! If that chap isn’t a real Iberian! I’ll bet he played haia-lai, and his fathers before him.”
“And that’s a Devonshire man if ever I saw one,” Henry whispered back. “Perforated dimes to pieces-of-eight that he poached the fallow deer and fled the king’s wrath in the first forecastle for the Spanish Main.”