upon the altar and sat first on the head of the god, and then on his
feet, and even tried the effect of seating himself upon the stone disk
that the god upheld above his navel. But through all of these
experiments the stone figure remained solidly immovable.

"I guess there was only one o' that tippin' kind," Young said, at last,
"an' he sort o' flocked by himself. Let's get out of here, anyway. If
this ever was the Aztec bank that we're lookin' for, there must have
been a prehistoric run on it that cleaned it out. They must have done
that sort o' thing in old times, eh, Professor? But it don't make much
difference to us now what they did or what they didn't; an' we'd better
fill up with water an' get out--that is, if there is any way of gettin'
out except along the way we came. There's no good in goin' back that
way. It would be better t' settle down here an' starve comfortably
without wearin' out shoe-leather doin' it. But I don't mean t' do that
until I've had a look all around th' top of this god-forsaken mountain,
an' made sure that there's only one way down."

My own thoughts had been dwelling on the possibility that Young's words
expressed; for at this definite point to which we had come, the path
that we had come by very reasonably might end--so leaving us in this
lonely region among the clouds to die slowly for lack of food. And there
was a certain fitness in our having made our way so far among the dead
only ourselves to die that added sombre fancies to our environment of
sombre realities. Yet there was a heartiness in Young's resolutely
expressed determination to search for a way out of our difficulties
before at all yielding to them that insensibly cheered me. His words had
a plucky ring to them; and bravery is as catching as is fear.

Our empty water-kegs were at the bottom of the pyramid, and when we
reached the fountain on our downward way we waited there while Pablo
went on with El Sabio and fetched them up to us. There was at least
solid comfort in knowing, as we went on downward with the kegs all
filled, that, whatever other death might come to us, at least we could
not die of thirst. At the bottom of the pyramid we left Fray Antonio and
Pablo, with El Sabio and the packs, and the three of us set out to
explore the three sides of the mountain-top that were unknown to us in
search of a downward path. A heavy mass of clouds had drifted over the
mountain again, so thick that at a rod away all was white