Imagine a sheer rock wall just like the cleft we had come up, but rock of a darker colour, that surrounded with the same unscaleable sides the little open space, about two hundred yards in diameter, at whose edge we were hidden in the valley mouth. On the far side of it, and facing us, the rock had been carved for some hundred feet across and sixty feet up into the semblance of a fort gateway.
There was the big central gate, with its massive pillars and great lintel carved after the fashion of a huge beam. Under this two great stone doors, embossed with stone spikes and square heads of nails in stone. On either side a small gate with similar stone-fashioned doors, each a single leaf, and on these again—worked in stone—the replicas of iron bar and spike and nail.
The big gate and the two small side doors were again all three enclosed in a frame fashioned like the projection of a fort, rounded towers on either side and crenelated bastions above. And in these bastions were long arrow-slips—real, these seemed, though showing dead black shadows.
On the long stone block that ran under the bastions were carvings of twisted serpents, whose heads met in a fan in the centre, above which was the full-rayed sun. This last, I think, had been gilded at some time, for it was brown and discoloured in places, as if at some earlier date it had been covered with colour, though now no trace of it remained.
Below that, and just above the main entrance, was lettering, standing up clear from the background.
“Can you read that?” I whispered as Forsyth focused his glasses.
“Too far,” he whispered back. “Pass me the telescope.” We had brought the telescope along with us luckily.
I passed it to him, and he undid the strap, fitted in the high-power eye-piece, and slid it into position with as much care as though stalking a markhor. He studied it a minute, and then turned to us. “Greek, and it’s more like the old Greek than what’s on the picture, though not quite the same,” he said. “It runs like this: ‘To those to north, the gate of life; but to those to south, the gate of death.’”
“It seems to be that, all right,” whispered back Wrexham; “this is the south side of the gate, and there are plenty of poor devils who have looked their last on life the last time they looked up at the arrow-slits. There’s a man there under the birds—foul beasts—or rather it was a man some time ago. They pulled his foot up just now while I was watching through my glasses. He’s not new.”
“Wish I could smoke,” muttered Forsyth; “not safe now, I suppose. This is foul!”