Her head was bowed and her shoulders shaking, but she raised her head proudly erect as she was seized by a guard whose blood-red hands forced her from the room.
And the dry, straining eyes of Lieutenant McGuire, that watched her going, saw the passing to an unknown fate of all he held dear, and the end of his unspoken dreams.
He scarcely felt the grip of the hands that seized him, nor knew when he and Sykes were carried from the room where Torg, the Emperor, held his savage court. The stone walls of the room where they were thrown could not hold his eyes; they looked through and beyond to see only the white and piteous face of a girl whose lips were whispering: “We will go together, Tommy—you and I.”
(Concluded in the next issue)
MYSTERIOUS CARLSBAD CAVERN
The largest cavern ever discovered, at Carlsbad Cavern, N. M., is soon going to be explored.
Carlsbad Cavern is so large that that three sky-scrapers a half-mile apart could be built in the largest of its innumerable “rooms,” according to Mr. Nicholson, who was there once before, about a year ago. Only 22 miles of the cavern’s apparently limitless tunnels have been explored, revealing such natural beauties that President Coolidge established it as a national monument.
The stalagmites in the cavern tower 100 feet high. The age of the cavern was put at 60,000,000 years by Dr. Willis T. Lee of the National Geographic Society, after his survey three years ago.
The caverns were discovered fifteen years ago by a New Mexican cowboy named Jim White, according to Mr. Nicholson. White was riding across a desert waste one day when he saw what appeared to be smoke from a volcano. After riding three hours in the direction of the smoke he discovered that it was an enormous cloud of bats issuing from the mouth of a gigantic cavern. He decided the cavern deserved exploration, and a few years later he and a Mexican boy were lowered in a barrel over the 750-foot cliff which overhangs the cavern.
The stalagmites of the cavern, according to Mr. Nicholson, are very vibrant and resonant. One can play a “xylophone solo” on them with practice, he said, but it is dangerous, since a certain pitch would crack them.