"Earthquake, most likely opened up some subterranean exit and drained it off to its present level and keeps on draining it, too. Its rich chocolate color shows the amount of water that flows in all the time, and that it doesn't have much chance to settle. It's the catch-basin for the entire circling watershed of the valley."
"Well, there's one house at least," Leoncia was saying five minutes later, as they rounded an angle of the cliff and saw, tucked against the cliff and extending out over the water, a low-roofed bungalow-like dwelling.
The piles were massive tree-trunks, but the walls of the house were of bamboo, and the roof was thatched with grassstraw. So isolated was it, that the only access, except by boat, was a twenty-foot bridge so narrow that two could not walk on it abreast. At either end of the bridge, evidently armed guards or sentries, stood two young men of the tribe. They moved aside, at a gesture of command from the Sun Priest, and let the party pass, although the two Morgans did not fail to notice that the spearmen who had accompanied them from the, Long House remained beyond the bridge.
Across the bridge and entered into the bungalow-like dwelling on stilts, they found themselves in a large room better furnished, crude as the furnishings were, than they would have expected in the Valley of Lost Souls. The grass mats on the floor were of fine and careful weave, and the shades of split bamboo that covered the window-openings were of patient workmanship. At the far end, against the wall, was a huge golden emblem of the rising sun similar to the one before the altar by the Long House. But by far most striking, were two living creatures who strangely inhabited the place and who scarcely moved. Beneath the rising sun, raised above the floor on a sort of dais, was a many-pillowed divan that was half — throne. And on the divan, among the pillows, clad in a softly-shimmering robe of some material no one of them had seen before, reclined a sleeping woman. Only her breast softly rose and softly fell to her breathing. No Lost Soul was she, of the inbred and degenerate mixture of Carib and Spaniard. On her head was a tiara of beaten gold and sparkling gems so large that almost it seemed a crown.
Before her, on the floor, were two tripods of gold the one containing smouldering fire, the other, vastly larger, a golden bowl fully a fathom in diameter. Between the tripods, resting with outstretched paws like the Sphinx, with unblinking eyes and without a quiver, a great dog, snowwhite of coat and resembling a Russian wolf-hound, stedfastly regarded the intruders.
"She looks like a lady, and seems like a queen, and certainly dreams to the queen's taste," Henry whispered, and earned a scowl from the Sun Priest.
Leoncia was breathless, but Torres shuddered and crossed himself, and said:
"This I have never heard of the Valley of Lost Souls. This woman who sleeps is a Spanish lady. She is of the pure Spanish blood. She is Castilian. I am as certain, as that I stand here, that her eyes are blue. And yet that pallor!" Again he shuddered. "It is an unearthly sleep. It is as if she tampered with drugs, and had long tampered with drugy-"
"The very thing!" Francis broke in with excited whispers. "The Lady Who Dreams drug dreams. They must keep her here doped up as a sort of super-priestess or super-oracle. That's all right, old priest," he broke off to say in Spanish. "If we wake her up, what of it? We have been brought here to meet her, and, I hope, awake."
The Lady stirred, as if the whispering had penetrated her profound of sleep, and, for the first time, the dog moved. turning his head toward her so that her down-dropping hand rested on his neck caressingly. The priest was imperative, now, in his scowls and gestured commands for silence. And in absolute silence they stood and watched the awakening of the oracle.