A trail of broken rock twisted down the mountain and ended in a doorlike piece of rock on the trail. There had been a landslide and the huge rock had fallen directly across the trail.
Because of his angle of observation, Scotty, Zircon, and Weiss were out of view and he leaned outward slightly to call to them. As he leaned over, his foot slipped forward and broken shale started to clatter down the cliff wall. It was a mere trickle at first, but as the weight of the shower rained against the cliff wall.
Rick felt a rumble and saw to his horror that his slip had dislodged a great slab. It broke off, bounced out from the wall and plummeted straight toward the spot where his friends were standing.
"Look out!" he shouted.
For a moment he didn"t dare look down or call to them. Then he heard Scotty"s voice. "Halloo-o-o ... Rick, are you all right?"
He turned cautiously and looked straight down.
All three figures were looking up at him. He let out his breath with a relieved whoosh.
"Yes, I"m okay," he yelled back. "I"ll take a look." He could see clearly the country around him and the other side of the cliff. It was much less precipitous on the far side, and as he looked down, Rick saw another trail hugging the cliff on that side. He followed it with his eyes. Far, far down its course, he could see that it joined with the path upon which his friends now stood. In the other direction it seemed to lead straight south, the way they wanted to go. If the three men retraced their steps, they could pick up this path, he decided. It would be a simple matter of following the new one from there on. He measured the distance with his eye and judged by the length of the narrow path that it would take them some time, perhaps two hours, to reach that junction far below.
He waved to them and prepared to descend along the path he had climbed. But he saw at a glance that the sliding shale had sheared away the path. Descending it now would be plain suicide.
He shouted his predicament to the figures below and gave them directions for finding the new path.
"I"ll climb down the other side and meet you at the big red boulder down there," he informed them. "It"s shaped like a beehive. You can"t miss it."
They waved and started down the path, and Rick watched them disappear.
Then he started to descend.
CHAPTER XIV.
Strange Warriors
RICK"S look at the side of the cliff had been deceptive. The descent wasn"t as easy as he had expected. The rock was jagged and cut his hands as he edged his way toward the path far below.
He was forced to make detours of as much as a quarter mile in order to lower himself a few feet. At one point he came to a stretch of the cliff that was gla.s.sy smooth. There seemed no way around it, but again he detoured and made a few feet more progress.
He looked at his hands and winced at the cuts in the palms, but he couldn"t rest now. He saw that the sun was rushing toward the western horizon and he certainly didn"t want to be caught on the face of the cliff at night.
The way looked easier for a short stretch and he was making fast progress for a time. Then he lowered himself to a wide shelf jutting from the cliff, and as he did, the rock he had used as a brace broke off in his hand. There was no danger of his falling off the shelf, but when he looked up, he realized that he couldn"t retrace his steps. And the shelf stuck too far out to enable him to lower himself from it.
He was trapped!
He searched the wall frantically for some way out of his predicament. Above him, it was smooth. Not a finger of rock existed for him to grasp, to retrace his steps.
The shelf was strewn with rocks of all sizes, relics of the hundreds of landslides that had occurred in these mountains. Toward the end of the shelf was a big boulder. Rick grasped it and leaned far out. The wall beneath it was steep, but there were lots of rocks sticking out. If only there were some way to lower himself to one of those rocks? He couldn"t grasp the edge and drop. It was too crumbly. He fingered his belt and a plan formed in his mind - if he dared try it. But he had to!
His fingers shook as he unbuckled the belt. Then he took another look below and his heart sank. Even if he could moor the belt to something, it was still not long enough for him to reach safety, below. If only he could lengthen it! He stripped the light windbreaker from his back. He looked at the seams of the arms, tugged hard at them and then yanked with all his strength. The seams held.
Thanking his lucky stars, he tied the ends of the sleeves together. He looped the belt around the knot in the sleeves and had a continuous length of double sleeve and belt.
If only the boulder were heavy enough, Rick prayed. He pushed at it and though it teetered slightly, he could not move it. The boulder would serve.
He draped the body of the jacket around the boulder as he would around the shoulders of a chair. Then he pulled on the belt and the arms stuck straight out from the boulder. If only the arms were long enough to give him the extra foot or two he needed!
Looking down from the shelf, he gulped, tested the improvised lowering rope and slid toward the edge. At the first jerk of his weight upon the odd arrangement, the rock teetered and terror shook Rick. But it teetered only an inch or two, and held.
The belt was smooth, and he was glad he had wrapped it around his hand. Inch by inch, he lowered himself toward the outjutting rocks beneath the shelf. His toe plucked out at one of them. He was almost at the end of his life line now. And as he hung there, ready to let out the last few inches of the belt, he realized that he would never have the strength to pull himself back up again.
It was now or never.
The end of the belt was reached, and he saw that he could not quite touch the rock toward which he had been aiming. He didn"t dare drop the last few inches, for he knew he could never hold his balance on that miserably small rung of rock.
His palms were perspiring, and his head was just below the edge of the shelf. Then he spied another rock, jutting out slightly beyond the one below him. It was about table-top size, and it would need a swing to get to it, but he had to try.
He started his body swaying like a pendulum, in toward the wall. It was taking the last ounce of strength from him and he knew he couldn"t hold on much longer. With a last, convulsive jerk, he swung free.
His feet landed squarely on the rock.
He grabbed for the wall with feet, knees, fingernails ... then he collapsed against its face.
For a full minute Rick lay there, breathing heavily. Then he looked straight down at what had lain in store for him had he slipped. His friends would never have recognized him after those razoredge rocks had finished catching him on the way down ... if they had ever found him.
He looked at his wrist watch and realized with a shock that four hours had elapsed since he had started to descend from the top of the cliff. It looked like another three to the ground.
As he dropped to the path and looked up at the course he had followed it seemed incredible that he had made it, but there he was, safe and sound. The red rendezvous rock agreed upon was off to his left, and he headed in that direction.
Distances were deceptive, he soon discovered. From the top of the cliff the red boulder had not seemed terribly far away, but as the minutes ticked off and he did not come to it, he began to get panicky. He felt terribly alone and once stopped and yelled at the top of his lungs.
The echoes laughed back at him.
He tried calling his friends" names.
There was no answer.
No reason why there should be, he told himself. They were probably still looking for this path. What if they didn"t find it? What if they got lost? What if he never saw them again?
He tried not to think of the answers, and hurried on as fast as the narrow pathway would permit. He looked down at the drop that fell away below him. He had forgotten what level ground was like. He would walk with a lean to the left for the rest of his days, he decided.
And then he heard a sound.
It was not mortal, he told himself. Probably an echo, but he stopped to listen. There it was again, and it was mortal.
A laugh! But a strange laugh. Not Scotty"s. And certainly no laugh like that had ever come from Weiss or Zircon. It was low and throaty, and if a laugh could be cruel, this one was cruel.
He was so startled that he couldn"t tell from which direction the sound had come and he started running one way and then stopped and headed the other way, in panic.
Why should he be frightened? Rick asked himself. If anyone were near, he wanted to see him, to ask his aid.
But some instinct raised the hair at the nape of his neck and he knew he must dodge this voice at all costs.
He looked wildly about, searching for a hiding place. Far ahead, he saw a hole in the wall, about six feet up.
But what if the voice were coming from that direction?
He had to chance it and he ran.
The voice was coming from this direction, and now he heard more than one I He heard them coming closer and he knew that only a miracle would keep him from being seen. They were just around the curve that shielded him from them.
His hands grabbed for the rocks that seemed placed beneath the hole like ladder rungs and, faster than he would have believed possible, he hauled himself toward the hole and into it.
And then, four of the strangest-looking men he had ever seen, came into view below him.
They were short, and their heads were shaven. They wore leather armor and helmets and each carried a spear, tipped with some coppery metal. They had wide, cruel mouths, and their faces were yellow and oily and their eyes slanted. They reminded Rick of something he had once seen in a book ... warriors of another age.
And then one of them reached for the rock below Rick"s hiding place and he realized with horror that the men were about to enter the very hole into which he had fled.
He stared about him in the darkness and knew from the draft that the niche was bigger than he had suspected when looking at it from the outside. He could hear even his breath echoing in its confinement, and he plunged into the darkness. The light from the entrance helped him find his way for a short distance, but soon he had to resort to his sense of touch to feel his way along the walls.
As long as he moved, he was staying ahead of these strange men. Instinct told him not to stop moving. Night had never been darker than the trap in which he found himself. It seemed to push against him, and then the wall fell off from his hand and he found himself groping for it in the dark.
"Must be a hole in the wall," he thought, and started crawling toward it.
It was a narrow niche in the cave that cupped off from the main pa.s.sage. If the strange warriors were without torches, he might escape detection. He crouched there, digging his fingers into his thighs, listening to the footsteps coming closer and closer.
Then, there was the smell of rancid oil next to him and a heavy foot, inches from his body, and he recoiled.
The other men were close behind, but they, too, pa.s.sed and he heard them shuffling ahead. Then the sound faded in the darkness.
When he considered it safe, he rose to his feet and made ready to retrace his footsteps to the path outside.
But something made him stop.
Those men ... where were they going? They had seemed very familiar with this cave, if it was a cave. It could be a pa.s.sageway. But to where?
Rick stood uncertainly in the dark. If those men were going toward civilization, it would be worth taking the chance of following them and finding out if that civilization could be of help to him. Scotty, Zircon, and Weiss would wait for him at the rendezvous. Besides, if they were anywhere near, they would have heard his shouts.
He felt for the wall again and started inching his way along in the inky blackness. Suddenly he saw a sliver of light and as he turned a curve in the pa.s.sageway, it turned to bright sunshine.
Though there was no sound from the leather-armored warriors, Rick crept cautiously toward the source of light. He came out upon a narrow ledge. Rude stone stairs dropped away below him. They twisted and turned down the face of a long mountain slope, and there at the foot of the steps was the most unbelievable sight Rick had ever seen.
A lush, green valley spread before his eyes. Studding it were obelisks and towers of a thousand hues. Cultivated fields and houses that dotted the valley in neat rows made a patchwork of exquisite beauty.
And then he realized who the men were that he had seen, and what he had stumbled on. He heard again the words of Zircon, when Chahda had spoken of seeing the men who had been tracking them, many days ago. The men Chahda saw had been dressed in the same attire as those Rick had just seen.
They were Mongols, Zircon had said, but of a kind considered dead for hundreds of years.
But they were not dead! Their city stretched before him.
A lost city of the ancient Mongols!
CHAPTER XV.
The Lost City
THE Mongol warriors had disappeared. Rick stepped cautiously from his shelter and looked down into the city.
It was breath-taking, a city of gold and alabaster, set in a gigantic natural cup in the mountains. The valley was almost square, hemmed in on four sides by sheer walls of rock that soared in broken crags up to the heights. And right across the center of the square Valley was a high, man-made wall of a white stone that glittered like granite.
The opening in which Rick stood was almost a hundred feet above the level valley floor. He followed the crude, stone steps down, keeping close to the inner wall and watching his footing.
At the bottom, the path forked. He debated, then turned left. There was no sign of the Mongols.
The city lay before him. Wide, stone-paved streets branched off in geometric patterns between squat, stone buildings of the same white stuff of which the high barrier wall was made. He stood still for a while, watching for some sign of life. But there was none. The city seemed deserted.
He went to the nearest building, moving on tiptoe, afraid to break the silence that lay over the city like a tangible thing.
It was a square building, flat on top, and it had neither windows nor doors. On its side were inscriptions in a language he could not read. The script was Oriental. The stone was rough and cold to the touch.
He was conscious that he was sweating. At first, he thought it was his nervousness and the eerieness of the place, but then he realized that the valley floor was warm. He guessed that volcanic action must lie close under the surface.
The wide street beckoned and he went down it, between rows of the strange, squat buildings. Soon he saw that the street led to a central shaft that rose like a golden needle from between the square structures. It looked like gold, but surely nothing so big could be made of precious metal. At its tip was a torch, cunningly carved from some red mineral.
Rick moved slowly, afraid to let the sound of his footsteps break the crushing silence. He half expected a silent, fearsome horde of Mongols to rise out of the very ground. His imagination peopled the stone buildings with savage beings who watched as he strode down the street.
So strong did the feeling become that he turned aside and walked to one of the buildings. This time he found a door, and peered in. A face leered at him and his blood turned to ice until he saw that it was a mask. Around the walls were stacks of leather armor, helmets, bows. He steeled himself to enter and went into the gloom. Nothing moved. No living thing inhabited the place.
He went back into the open air and continued on toward the central spire. As he walked, he kept turning his head from side to side, watching, waiting, poised to run at the slightest sign of movement.
He reached the tafl needle and saw that it was the very center of the city - on his side of the barrier wall, at least. The golden spire rose out of another of the squat buildings, and the walls of the base were embossed with the same metal as the obelisk itself.
Something about the thing made his skin crawl. He saw the Oriental script engraved on the base of the spire, but this time it was a single word. He touched the golden metal and it was smooth and cold. He took a jackknife from his belt, opened the blade, and cut into the metal. It scored easily, and a thin shaving curled off.
His eyes widened. Soft! Soft as ... as pure gold! He tucked the metal shaving into his pocket and walked around the base. There were doors in this one, but they were closed and he was reluctant to open them.
He left the central shaft and walked along the deserted streets to the barrier wall. It rose thirty feet into the air, a glittering, unbroken surface. He went along it, looking for some opening. He came to the mountainside without finding one. If only he could scale the wall.