Page:J Allan Dunn--The Girl of Ghost Mountain.djvu/69

Rh produced matches and soon they held flaring lights that revealed a narrow tunnel, not particularly moist and with the air pure enough, a tunnel that Sheridan believed had been enlarged if not entirely fashioned by hand. This theory was confirmed by the rude petroglyphs they passed, picture phrases chiseled in the rock and filled in with red and black pigments that held their color, for all the ages that had passed since the prehistoric chroniclers tried to link up their generation and its deeds with those to follow.

The floor rose at a stiff gradient. Occasionally one of the horses stumbled, its shoes striking sparks from the rock. A strong draught faced them. The tunnel turned abruptly to the left, widened, its walls opening upwards and, overhead, they saw the sprinkled light of stars. Their eyes became adjusted to the gloom of this grim gorge that lay before them, a gigantic gash, the unhealed scar of some titanic upheaval. Their torches were but small use now and they stamped them out. They were inside the mountain wall. Towering, the enormous rampart of Ghost Mountain lifted, springing from a floor midway the height of the mountain, reached from the tunnel's end by a series of terraces. Ghost Mountain was semi-hollow; its pinnacles and turrets were on true walls that guarded this hidden valley where, according to the Indian legend, once lived a tribe, remote in its fastness until the fierce Apaches raided it. The moon only tipped the eastern angles of the highest spires, the stars managed a lurky twilight, from which slowly emerged weird