Page:J Allan Dunn--The Girl of Ghost Mountain.djvu/182

164 help, striving to clear her wits for the final issue.

The Painted Rocks, El Pueblo del Silencio, thrust up from the sands in two walls of miraculous form and color, a ravine between escarpments of dazzling white, of pinkish grey, orange, salmon; capped here and there by dark red lava, cliffs caverned and indented by purple and mauve hollows where the shadows quivered in the fierce sunlight. They rose five hundred feet and more in great ledges piled with debris, where tons upon tons of burned clay had avalanched down, weathered and leavened by changing temperatures, lying like broken bricks upon the terraces of an American Babylon.

The great marvel of the City of Silence was the startling semblance of ruins, at the base of the cliffs, perched on the slopes and terraces. Here were arcades, castles, palaces, cathedrals, towers and domes, a bewildering fantasy of Oriental and Gothic forms, spires, gargoyles, pedestalled sphinxes, mutilated statues set in niches. There were walls, pierced with doors and windows, of a masonry that appeared to have defied Time, to be allied exactly with the fragments of burned clay heaped all about them.

Four hundred feet up on a grey, ribbed slope stood a citadel, a fortress of castellated ramparts, steep, buttressed, dreamy in the sun like a stronghold of Granada. Below, at half the height, were columns of stately symmetry. To the left, on the summit of the cliff, colossal, supremely dignified in a thousand-foot façade, ran a replica of the Acropolis.

They entered the ravine, treeless, waterless, though everywhere the place showed evidences of