“Earthquake, most likely—opened up some subterranean exit and drained it off to its present level—and keeps on draining it, too. Its rich chocolate color shows the amount of water that flows in all the time, and that it doesn’t have much chance to settle. It’s the catch-basin for the entire circling watershed of the valley.”
“Well, there’s one house at least,” Leoncia was saying five minutes later, as they rounded an angle of the cliff and saw, tucked against the cliff and extending out over the water, a low-roofed bungalow-like dwelling.
The piles were massive tree-trunks, but the walls of the house were of bamboo, and the roof was thatched with grass-straw. So isolated was it, that the only access, except by boat, was a twenty-foot bridge so narrow that two could not walk on it abreast. At either end of the bridge, evidently armed guards or sentries, stood two young men of the tribe. They moved aside, at a gesture of command from the Sun Priest, and let the party pass, although the two Morgans did not fail to notice that the spearmen who had accompanied them from the Long House remained beyond the bridge.
Across the bridge and entered into the bungalow-like dwelling on stilts, they found themselves in a large room better furnished, crude as the furnishings were, than they would have expected in the Valley of Lost Souls. The grass mats on the floor were of fine and careful weave, and the shades of split bamboo that covered the window-openings were of patient workmanship. At the far end, against the wall, was a huge golden emblem of the rising sun similar to the one before the altar by the Long House. But by far most striking, were two living creatures who strangely inhabited the place and who scarcely moved. Beneath the rising sun, raised above the floor on a sort of dais, was a many-pillowed divan that was half-throne. And on the divan, among the pillows, clad in a softly-shimmering robe of some material no one of them had seen before, reclined a sleeping woman. Only her breast softly rose and softly fell to her breathing. No Lost Soul was she, of the inbred and degenerate mixture of Carib and Spaniard. On her head was a tiara of beaten gold and sparkling gems so large that almost it seemed a crown.