CHAPTER V.
THE HOLLOW ALTAR.
"Magnificent indeed!"
The words, falling from the professor"s lips, echoed hollowly against the walls of the lofty, vaulted chamber in which the adventurers found themselves, after traversing a narrow pa.s.sage leading inward from the causeway.
The walls of this chamber, which must have been fully thirty feet in height at its greatest alt.i.tude, were formed of the soft rock, out of which it had been excavated apparently uncounted ages before. They were daubed with grotesque figures in faded, but still discernible, colors. Most of these figures had to do with scenes of violence, and in almost all of them the figure of what appeared to be an enormous rattlesnake, with human head and arms, predominated.
Among the mural decorations were some that puzzled the professor considerably. They were crude drawings of men in what appeared to be intended for boats. The professor found these inexplicable. The very idea of boats in that arid spot seemed absurdly out of place. Why, then, should the mesa-dwellers have depicted them?
Light was furnished to the chamber by an irregularly shaped hole in the roof above. Although there was plenty of illumination, it had yet been some moments before the adventurers, coming out of the brilliant sunlight outside, grew used enough to the gloom to make out their surroundings. When they did so, the first words uttered were those of the professor recorded above.
Like some queer, long-legged bird, the man of science, with a giant magnifying gla.s.s held up to his eye, sped hither and thither on his long, angular limbs, inspecting minutely the drawings and crude attempts at decoration. Already he had out his tape-measure and sketch-book, making observations and recording measurements.
Presently, however, he recalled himself from the first heat of his enthusiasm.
"After all," he said, "we shall have plenty of time in which to explore this chamber, which seems to have been used as a council hall. Let us examine the remainder of this remarkable place."
"You may well call it that, perfusser," grunted Pete. "It"s remarkable fer the dust thet"s in it, if nothing else. But what I"d like to know," he added to himself, "is jes" whar the owners of them footsteps vanished themselves to."
Which brings us to a remarkable discovery, made a few moments before our party had entered the "Council Hall," as the professor called it.
As you may imagine, they had traced the footsteps with some care, hoping to come upon a solution of the mystery of their origin. Picture their astonishment, then, when you are told that the footsteps abruptly vanished at the summit of the zig-zag trail. Although dust lay thick on the chambers within the mesa, not a solitary foot-mark marred its soft gray surface. With the exception of the numerous footsteps on the trail to the summit, there was no other sign of human visitors.
Like most old plainsmen and all wild animals, Pete was suspicious of anything he couldn"t understand, and it certainly did seem inexplicable that a party of men should have visited the mesa and contented themselves with running or walking up and down the causeway outside, or promenading the summit. Such, however, appeared to be the only explanation, and as such they were forced to accept it.
But such speculations as these were far from monopolizing the minds of the professor and the boys. They eagerly traversed chamber after chamber, finding these latter to be small "apartments," so to speak, giving upon a common pa.s.sage just beyond the "Council Hall." The professor told them that each of these small chambers was formerly the home of an aboriginal family. In the floor of the pa.s.sage he pointed to numerous bowl-like holes, which, according to him, had been used for the sharpening of spears and arrow heads.
In some of the small chambers specimens of rude pottery were found, all ornamented with the same figure of the human-headed rattlesnake.
Evidently the form represented must have been a deity of the tribe.
Each of the small chambers was lighted by one of the holes cut in the face of the cliff, which they had noticed from below. The boys darted in and out of the various rock chambers, like ferrets in a rabbit warren, followed at a more leisurely pace by the professor and Coyote Pete.
"Maybe we"ll find some treasure," suggested Ralph Stetson, as, with flushed faces, plentifully begrimed with dust, they paused in the last of the rocky chambers.
"Say, you"ve got treasure on the brain, ever since we found that chest of Jim Hicks" in the pa.s.sage-way under the old mission, and started our bank accounts," laughed Jack. "You must be forgetting that this mesa has been visited frequently by cattlemen and wandering prospectors."
"Well, I should hardly call it frequently, Jack," put in Professor Wintergreen, who was now standing with Coyote Pete at his elbow, in the narrow entrance to the rocky chamber.
"Nope," added Coyote Pete; "you can bet your boots we didn"t come here except when we had to. In the past, though, it made a mighty good watering-place for the cattlemen driving from one section of this country to another. Sence they cut up that land over to the westward inter farms, though, the big cattle drives have stopped, and I don"t suppose any one"s bin around here for a long time, "cepting those varmints whose feet-marks we seen."
"How do you know they are varmints?" laughed Walt Phelps.
"Don"t see what business they"d hev here otherwise, and----" began Pete, but a perfect tempest of laughter at his expense drowned the rest of his speech.
"Well, now that we seem to have pretty well explored the habitation part of the mesa, let us make our way to the summit," suggested the professor.
With a whoop and yell, the excited boys followed the suggestion at once, and a dash up the narrow causeway followed at imminent risk of one of another losing his footing.
"Hey, hold on thar!" yelled Pete, as they dashed upward, "we don"t want no funerals here, an" it"s er drop of more"n a hundred feet to ther ground."
This rather checked the boys" enthusiasm, and they went more slowly thereafter.
The summit of the mesa was found to consist of a small plateau, about a quarter of an acre in extent, perfectly bare, and shaped like a saucer.
Near the center was the hole which gave illumination to the council hall below them, while in a spot almost exactly in the middle of the queer elevation, was a rough, square erection of sun-baked brick. This was about twelve feet in length, five feet in height, and six feet or so through. Apparently it had once been a kind of an altar. The professor thought this a.s.sumption tenable, as it was known that the aborigines who had once inhabited the mesa had been sun-worshipers.
"Ugh!" shuddered Jack, as he gazed at the altar. "And they used to offer human sacrifices here."
"I think it altogether likely," said the professor calmly; "probably that altar has witnessed the immolation of more than a hundred victims at a single tribal ceremony."
Ralph Stetson was clambering up on the altar as the professor spoke, but at hearing these words he hastily descended again.
"I guess I"ll defer examining it till some other time," he said decidedly.
From the summit of the mesa a wonderful view could be obtained. At that alt.i.tude the rocky, desolate range of sierras to the south could be seen clearly, although a mile or so distant.
"Thar"s the border yonder," said Pete, pointing.
"And over across there is father, I guess," said Jack. "I hope he found everything at the Esmeralda all right."
"Sure he did," said Pete confidently. "I tell you, these greaser uprisings don"t amount to a busted gourd. Mister Diaz"s tin soldiers come along, and "pop-bang! Adios!" It"s all over."
"But I have heard that in this case the insurrectionists of Northern Chihuahua are exceptionally well provided with arms and ammunition,"
objected the professor. "The American government can"t make out from whence they are supplied with guns and munitions of war."
"Huh, where"d they git "em from, I"d like to know?" snorted Pete. "The border is well guarded at any point where they would be likely to ship "em across, and----"
"How about the _unlikely_ points?" inquired the professor amiably.
"Um--ah--well," began Pete, somewhat stumped by this last, "I don"t see what that"s got to do with it."
"But I do. Mexicans, my friend, are, as you should know, a cunning race. Moreover, those of them who dwell along it know the border far better than any white could ever hope to. By the admission of our own secret agents, it has. .h.i.therto been impossible to find how the arms, which the Chihuahua rebels are receiving, can reach them. It is obvious, however, that there must be some way in which they do, hence----"
"Waal, perfusser, hev it your own way," grunted Pete, rather red and angry. The professor"s logic did indeed seem una.s.sailable. The rebels of Northern Chihuahua were getting arms--but how? The cow-puncher and the boys recalled now a visit made to Mr. Merrill"s ranch some weeks before by a party of United States secret agents.
The men were puzzled and angry over their failure to locate the "leak."
Somehow arms were being shipped across the border into Chihuahua from American soil, but just how had hitherto baffled all the efforts of their ingenuity to discover.
"There, there, don"t be so easily offended," counseled the professor, perceiving Pete"s palpable irritation. "After all, the matter has nothing to do with us. We are here to measure the mesa for scientific purposes, not to get into arguments over how a band of insurrectos are getting their arms. Come, boys, to work. Let us begin at the top, by measuring the altar. Suppose, Jack, you lay the tape on it, while I make a rough field sketch of the structure."
The boys, now over their first repulsion to having anything to do with the altar, about which such grisly memories cl.u.s.tered, eagerly began to carry out these orders, while Coyote Pete seated himself on the side of the summit overlooking the travelers" camp below, and amused himself by throwing small bits of detached rock down at the unoffending One Spot, Two Spot and Three Spot.
The base of the altar being duly measured and recorded, Jack, tape in hand, followed by the others, clambered up its rough sides, which afforded an easy foothold, for the purpose of ascertaining the dimensions of the top. To the lad"s astonishment, however, there was no summit. That is to say, the altar was hollow.
The professor exhibited considerable scientific excitement on hearing this. The man of science had been greatly puzzled over the total absence of any traces of the human sacrifices he knew must have taken place there. He now hailed Jack eagerly.
"Are there not some bones or traces of sacrifices inside it, my boy?"