Page:Gaston Leroux--The bride of the sun.djvu/61

Rh tombs, each containing a mummy rudely drawn from its thousand-year sleep by the pick of the excavator. Dick and Maria-Teresa had left their motor, but did not join the others. Instead, they wandered silently, almost sadly, in another direction, and the car had started off again in the care of the negro chauffeur, to be garaged at Ancon.

"It is horrible," said Maria-Teresa, pressing Dick's hand. "Why cannot they leave them in peace?"

Seated on a little mound well out of sight of the others, they forgot their surroundings. And it was in this horrible burial-ground they exchanged their first true lovers' kiss.

The sound of voices brought them back to reality. The president of the Society, followed by an interested retinue, was explaining the most interesting tombs.

"Walking through this necropolis," he said, "it is no effort to evoke the shades of the Incas, and to feel for a minute as if one were living among them.... Here, six feet below ground, we first found a dog which had been sacrificed on its master's tomb.... The dead man's wife and chief servants also followed him to the next world.... We next found the wife's body.... Like the dog, she had been strangled, probably because she had not had the courage to take her