owed as he was with
an almost miraculous sense of location he moved with great assurance
through the shadows of the temple yard.

Taking advantage of the denser shadows close to the walls and of what
shrubs and trees there were he came without mishap at last to the
ornate building concerning the purpose of which he had asked Lu-don
only to be put off with the assertion that it was forgotten--nothing
strange in itself but given possible importance by the apparent
hesitancy of the priest to discuss its use and the impression the
ape-man had gained at the time that Lu-don lied.

And now he stood at last alone before the structure which was three
stories in height and detached from all the other temple buildings. It
had a single barred entrance which was carved from the living rock in
representation of the head of a gryf, whose wide-open mouth constituted
the doorway. The head, hood, and front paws of the creature were
depicted as though it lay crouching with its lower jaw on the ground
between its outspread paws. Small oval windows, which were likewise
barred, flanked the doorway.

Seeing that the coast was clear, Tarzan stepped into the darkened
entrance where he tried the bars only to discover that they were
ingeniously locked in place by some device with which he was unfamiliar
and that they also were probably too strong to be broken even if he
could have risked the noise which would have resulted. Nothing was
visible within the darkened interior and so, momentarily baffled, he
sought the windows. Here also the bars refused to yield up their
secret, but again Tarzan was not dismayed since he had counted upon
nothing different.

If the bars would not yield to his cunning they would yield to his
giant strength if there proved no other means of ingress, but first he
would assure himself that this latter was the case. Moving entirely
around the building he examined it carefully. There were other windows
but they were similarly barred. He stopped often to look and listen but
he saw no one and the sounds that he heard were too far away to cause
him any apprehension.

He glanced above him at the wall of the building. Like so many of the
other walls of the city, palace, and temple, it was ornately carved and
there were too the peculiar ledges that ran sometimes in a horizontal
plane and again were tilted at an angle, giving ofttimes an impression
of irregularity and even crookedness to the buildings. It was not a
diffi