There was just a faint movement of air, and undoubtedly, as Wrexham said, it was bringing down to us odours that evoked other scenes back in the war years. Two minutes later, rounding another bend, we were aware of brighter light in front. “Steady,” said I; “I think we’ve come to the end. Stop here a minute while I look ahead.” Another fifty yards round a still sharper and narrower bend, and then I drew back quickly into the shadow of the valley, which had suddenly widened, and was partly filled with some masses of fallen rock. I drew in my breath as I looked, and then, stepping back, waved up the others, signalling silence as I did so. When they came up, I motioned them behind the rocks and pointed. As they craned their heads cautiously up, I heard Wrexham give a low whistle of surprise. For there, straight in front, was the open clearing and the rock gate, cut into the solid face of the cliff just as the old diary described it. And on the white stones of the clearing were bones, in large numbers--gaunt ribs and rounded skulls--and a pervading smell of death. While, most ominous of all, in the centre of the clearing a huddle of draggle-winged vultures jostled and flapped and writhed their foul necks about something hidden beneath them. We crouched there, staring breathlessly across the clearing at the gate on the far side. Imagine a sheer rock wall just like the cleft we had come up, but rock of a darker colour, that surrounded with the same unscaleable sides the little open space, about two hundred yards in diameter, at whose edge we were hidden in the valley mouth. On the far side of it, and facing us, the rock had been carved for some hundred feet across and sixty feet up into the semblance of a fort gateway. There was the big central gate, with its massive pillars and great lintel carved after the fashion of a huge beam. Under this two great stone doors, embossed with stone spikes and square heads of nails in stone. On either side a small gate with similar stone-fashioned doors, each a single leaf, and on these again--worked in stone--the replicas of iron bar and spike and nail. The big gate and the two small side doors were again all three enclosed in a frame fashioned like the projection of a fort, rounded towers on either side and crenelated bastions above. And in these bastions were long arrow-slips--real, these seemed, though showing dead black shadows. On the long stone block that ran under the bastions were carvings of twisted serpents, whose heads met in a fan in the centre, above which was the full-rayed sun. This last, I think, had been gilded at some time, for it was brown and discoloured in places, as if at some earlier date it had been covered with colour, though now no trace of it remained. Below that, and just above the main entrance, was lettering, standing up clear from the background. “Can you read that?” I whispered as Forsyth focused his glasses.