“Just what I think, my boy,” said the professor, “and by the same token, look here!”
He indicated a big ring of some yellowish metal that hung directly in the center of the seeming blank wall.
“I’ll experiment,” he said, giving it a twist.
But nothing occurred.
Then he tried tugging it. Again no result followed.
“Look,” cried Ralph suddenly, “there’s a metal plate under your feet, professor. Perhaps if you stand on that and then tug you will have some results.”
“That sounds reasonable,” said Professor Wintergreen, doing as the boy had indicated.
This time, amid a cheer from the boys, something did happen. The door slowly swung on invisible hinges and beyond it their torch-lights fell on a scene of almost overwhelming grandeur.
It was a chamber, seemingly of gleaming white marble. Around the walls, at regular intervals, were ranged the figures of what appeared to be idols, but which they presently discovered were perfectly embalmed bodies of past rulers of the mountain dwellers. At one end of the chamber on a raised dais was a hideous figure which they readily guessed to be the deity of the forgotten race.
The face of this image was spread into a monstrous expression of malignant cruelty. But it was the eyes that startled them. They blazed in the torch-lights like two balls of fire.