emarked the missionary, "with broad steps leading up to it. What a
commanding object it must then have been."

"The difficulty will be to climb what was once the flight of steps,"
said Hughes. "I don't see how we can manage it."

Slinging their rifles behind them, and after many failures, the two
helping each other from time to time, and taking advantage of every
projection, stood at last on the raised platform on which the building
had rested. Below them ran a maze of crumbled galleries and
court-yards: and wherever the eye could penetrate, mounds of fallen
masonry cropped up amidst the dense forest growth.

The vast ruin itself was now a shapeless mass, being utterly broken and
defaced. The top of the mound was overgrown by bush, interlaced with
creeping plants, and, as using their knives, the two cut their way
onward, the light of day penetrated feebly into a ruined chamber of vast
size. A dead silence reigned therein, and as they paused at the
entrance and looked back on the scene which lay below, perhaps the first
Europeans who had stood on that weird spot for many ages, the missionary
could not but feel dispirited.

"The day-dream of my life realised. I stand among the ruins of the
cities of old; but where they begin, or where they end I know not. The
forest has re-asserted her old rights, torn from her by the hand of
civilisation," he remarked.

"Look where you will there is nothing to be seen but broken mounds and
tottering walls; it would require a brigade of men and years of work to
clear these ruins," replied Hughes.

"Yes, the extent of them is a mystery at present. We can but affirm
their existence. What a deep dead silence hangs over the spot. Let us
go on."

They penetrated the ruined chamber, but hardly had they put their feet
across the threshold, when bats in vast numbers came sweeping along,
raising, as they did so, a fine dust, which was nearly blinding. The
ruins seemed their home, and there they lived, bred, and died in
countless numbers. Some were of a sickly-looking greenish colour, and
of heavy and lumbering flight, often striking against the two explorers
as they came along.

At one moment the missionary was surrounded by these tenants of the
ruined palace, these winged things which had taken for themselves the
abodes of the Pharaohs of old. He struck out in self-defence and killed
several, measuring one for curiosity. Its length was only between five
and six inches, but