Page:Taylor - In the Dwellings of the Wilderness.djvu/63

 long, midnight black, straight and silky fine; but as he touched it, it came off in his hand. The eyes were gone, the sockets empty; the lips, dry and sunken, stretched grinning back from two rows of perfect teeth.

"What a mockery!" Merritt said suddenly. "I'd like to know what she was doing here. That door never got walled up in that style by any chance. Let's take a look around."

They looked; and on the walls they found their clue. The pictured story of a drama played out and ended direfully two thousand years before, with one of the actors, decked out as she had played her part, lying at their feet.

"I think it begins over here, where I am," Holloway remarked, from a corner