Page:Amazing Stories Volume 01 Number 12.djvu/13

Rh evidently were articulated on wires and iron rods and stood before the travelers in the awkward postures such objects assume. Among the things, Pethwick recognized the whitened frames of snake, condor, sheep, vicuña, puma, monkey and at the end, standing upright, the bones of a man.

The specimens were accurately spaced around the end of the trail, for this was the last of the road. The skulls grinned fixedly at the DeLong Geographical Expedition. In the gusty wind the arms of the man swung and beat against his thigh bone in a grotesque travesty of mirth.

Something touched Pethwick from behind. He turned with a shudder and saw Standifer. The secretary of the expedition looked at the assemblage for a moment, then drew out his note-book and pen, gave the pen a fillip to start a flow of ink and methodically jotted down the list before him. When he had finished he glanced up inquiringly as he rescrewed the top on his writing instrument.

“Don't suppose any one is moving a museum, eh, Pethwick?”

“No,” said the engineer, studying the figures.

“You don't think so?” surprised.

“Certainly not!”

“Huh!” Standifer drew forth his book again.

“Makes a sort of little mystery of it, doesn't it?”

And he jotted down this fact.

Prof. Demetriovich made his observation on the probable source of the objects before them.

“Standifer's hypothesis is not as bad as it sounds, Pethwick,” observed the savant.

“You don't mean these really belong to some scientist?” cried the engineer.

“I think their arrangement proves it.”

The engineer looked at the professor curiously.

“These skeletons are arranged in the order of their evolutionary development.”

A glance showed this to be the case and it rather surprised Pethwick.

“Does that hold any significance?”

M. Demetriovich walked over to the frame of the puma and shook it slightly as he inspected it.

“It would suggest a scientist arranged these specimens. A savage or a rustic would have been more likely to have strung them out according to size, or else he would have mixed them higgledypiggledy, and the probability that he would have hit on their evolutionary order would have been remote indeed.” The professor gave the puma's bones another shake. “Besides that, this articulation is very cleverly done—too cleverly for unpractised hands.”

“But why should a scientist leave his specimens out like this?” demanded the engineer in amazement.

“To begin with, this seems to be the end of the trail—the shipping-point, so to speak, and for the further reason that water boils at a very low temperature at this altitude.”

As the professor's fingers had touched some particles of flesh still adhering to the puma's vertebrae, he stepped across to a little patch of snow, stooped and washed his hands in it.

His two companions stared at him.

“Water boiling at a low temperature—altitude—what's that got to do with it?” interrogated the engineer.

The scientist smiled.

“I thought you would see that. If boiling water is too cool to clean the bones properly, here are some very trustworthy assistants above us.”

M. Demetriovich indicated the vultures still soaring overhead.

The secretary, who had been scribbling rapidly during the last part of this discourse, now crossed out a few lines on a former page with the remark: “Well, there is no mystery to it after all.”

“But look here!” ecxlaimed Pethwick. “We're scooped!”

“What do you mean—scooped?” asked the old Rumanian.

“Somebody has beaten us to this field. There are rival explorers in these mountains.”

“Tut, tut,” chided the old man. “You should say, my dear Pethwick, we have ‘colleagues’ instead of ‘rivals,’ I am charmed to believe they are here. We must get with them and try to be of assistance to them.”

The kindly old scientist stared away among the great bluish peaks, speculating on where his “colleagues” would be.

“But look here,” objected Standifer in alarm; “there will be another secretary with that expedition, grabbing all this literary material—”

“Lads, lads,” reproached the old savant, “you have yet to learn the opulence of nature. She is inexhaustible. This party, another party, fifty parties toiling at the same time could never fathom all the marvels that lie under the sweep of our gaze. Why, gentlemen, for instance, in Bucharest I and a colleague worked for three years on the relation of the olfactory system of catarrhine monkeys with that of human beings. Our effort was to approximate in what epoch the sense of smell became of secondary importance to humanity. This, of course, would mark a great change in the mode of living among men.

“As I say, we spent three years on the two nervous systems and yet our discoveries were most dissimilar. Now, what are a few white nerve-threads to all this wilderness of snow and boulders? Your fears are quite baseless.”

IS two companions laughed, half ashamed of their jealousy, and then inspected the scene before them, which up till now had been lost in the grisly detail of the skeletons.

The mountain side on which they stood dropped away in an enormous declivity fully a mile and a half deep and led into a vast and sinister valley that stretched toward the northeast until its folds and twists were lost among the flashing peaks.

The extraordinary part of the scene was that instead of spreading the vivid green of the tropics below the tree-line this great depression looked black and burned. The ensemble recalled to Pethwick certain remarkable erosions he had seen in the West of the United States. Only here, the features were slashed out with a gigantism that dwarfed our western canyons and buttes.

And there was another striking difference. In the North American West the Grand Canyon and the