Page:Weird Tales volume 30 number 04.djvu/97

Rh promise to help these Blacks against Thargo," Clark told his men, "whether or not I return."

Then Clark brought from his pack the leaden flask he had brought so far, along such a dangerous trail in preparation for this time. He paused then for a moment, before the silent quartet.

"Good luck, boys, if I don't come back," he said.

"The same to you, chief, and it's me thinks you're going to need it," muttered Mike Shinn, as they shook hands.

"We go out the back of this dwelling," whispered Lurain, to Clark. "Follow me—and be very silent."

He emerged with her into the checkered moonlight and shadow of one of Dordona's silent streets. The girl, he saw now, carried a short, pointed metal bar. She led by deserted alleys of crumbling ruins, not toward the great temple, but toward a ruined, deserted stone building a quarter-mile from the great dome.

followed her wonderingly into the ruin. She led across a room strewn with debris of crumbling stone, and knelt on the corner of the stone floor. He knelt puzzledly beside her, turning his tiny flashlight beam on the weathered blocks of the floor.

"Dig out these blocks," whispered Lurain, pointing to the floor. "I will hold the light."

"But I don't " Clark began, then halted and obeyed. It was evident that Lurain knew what she was about.

With the metal bar she had brought, he soon dug out four of the big blocks. There was revealed beneath them a dark, burrow-like opening in the earth, the mouth of a horizontal underground passage. Lurain dropped quickly down into this, and Clark followed. Turning his beam, he discovered the passage was shoulder-high, extending away through the solid rock.

"This passage," Lurain whispered, "was dug secretly many generations ago, by plotters in the city who wished to reach the pit and go down the stairs to the Lake of Life. They were of the rebels of that time who finally left Dordona to found the city K'Lamm. They could not enter the pit from the temple, for the stair-head there is always guarded, as you saw. So they dug this passage, opening into the pit below.

"Just as they finished their sacrilegious work," she continued, "their plot was detected. They were slain before they could make use of the passage, and it was blocked up and its existence kept secret. But the rulers of Dordona have known of it, and as daughter of the present ruler I knew of it. It is the one way we can enter the pit, for if we tried to enter it in the temple, the guards there would kill us at once."

Clark's hopes bounded. "Let's get on, then."

He led the way, flashing his beam ahead. As they advanced in the passage, they heard a dull roar that became louder and louder. Clark knew it was the sound of the cataract falling into the sacred shaft, and his excitement increased. Lurain, pressing on behind him, was shivering.

They reached the end of the passage. They crouched, petrified by the stupefying view ahead. The opening in which they crouched was twenty feet below the floor of the temple, in the rock side of the stupendous pit. Right below and outside this opening lay the narrow steps of the spiraling stone stair.

Out there in the pit, not ten yards from them, there gleamed in the faint light from above the falling waters of the thundering cataract, the river from far away that tumbled headlong down into this W. T.—7