“Come in here, Phil! Here’s the queerest thing—just come in here for a minute!”
Of course I at once crept through the hole, to find myself in a little chamber about ten feet long, six feet wide and four feet high, built up of great flat slabs of stone, which, falling from above, had accidentally so arranged themselves as to form this little room.
At first I thought it was the little room itself to which Joe had referred as “queer,” but Joe, scouting such an idea, exclaimed:
“No, no, bless you! I didn’t mean that. That’s nothing. Look here!”
So saying, he struck a match and showed me, along one side of the chamber, a great crack in the ground, three feet wide, extending to the left an unknown distance—for in that direction it was covered by loose rocks of large size—while to the right it pinched out entirely.
It was evident to me that this crevice had existed ever since the great break had occurred which had separated the First from the Second Mesa, but that, being covered by the fragments which had fallen from the cliff—itself formed by the subsidence of the First Mesa from what had once been the general level—it had hitherto remained concealed.
“Well, that certainly is ‘queer,’” said I. “How deep is it, I wonder?”
“Don’t know. Pitch a stone into it.”
I did so; judging from the sound that the crevice was probably thirty or forty feet deep.