Page:Allan Dunn--Dead Man's Gold.djvu/229

Rh place the reverberations crashed and rolled while the reek of exploded gases forced itself down to their lungs and started them coughing.

Then out of the heights grisly shapes came toppling from shelves and ledges in a ghastly rain of ancient mummies disturbed by the crash and shock of the explosion, their desiccated bodies breaking into shreds and powder that lined mouth and nostrils with this nauseating dust of the dead. They did not know the nature of this descent until Stone switched on his torch and they saw all about them, strewing the floor of the place, the crumbled remnants, dried-up heads that leered at them, broken off from the brittle trunks, bits of brown bone sticking out from what had once been flesh. Stone saw Healy swiftly cross himself while Larkin shuddered and Harvey leaned over and was frankly sick. Stone felt inclined to emulate him. The horrid pluvium was in his ears and hair and eyes, it had sifted down his collar, and it was hard to shake off the suggestion that these shapes had launched themselves upon the invaders in one last attempt to guard their holy of holies, to protect the savage, sacred shrine from profanation.

But as they went forward to where the milky quartz was piled up on the floor with the gold shining from it thick as herring scales on a seine after a big haul, they forgot all superstition, and all the ghosts of a thousand generations could not have stopped their final rush. The fire was out and scattered by the explosion but they squatted down in front of the shattered matrix and gloated while Stone and Larkin