A right-angled turn completed the elbow and gave them access to a small
but well-lighted rock chamber. From a window, high up and barred with
vertical bars of stone a foot thick and half as wide, poured gray
daylight. The floor of the place was littered with white-picked bones of
men. An examination of the skulls showed them to be those of Europeans.
Scattered among them were rifles, pistols, and knives, with, here and
there, a machete.
“Thus far they won, across the very threshold to the treasure,” Francis
said, “and, from the looks, began to fight for its possession before
they laid hands on it. Too bad the old man isn’t here to see what
happened to his father.”
“Might there not have been survivors who managed to get away with the
loot?” suggested Henry.
But at that moment, casting, his eyes from the bones to a survey of the
chamber, Francis saw what made him say:
“Without doubt, no. See those gems in those eyes. Rubies, or I never saw
a ruby!”
They followed his gaze to the stone statue of a squat and heavy female
who stared at them red-eyed and open-mouthed. So large was the mouth
that it made a caricature of the rest of the face. Beside it, carved
similarly of stone, and on somewhat more heroic lines, was a more
obscene and hideous male statue, with one ear of proportioned size and
the other ear as grotesquely large as the female’s mouth.
“The beauteous dame must be Chia all right,” Henry grinned. “But who’s
her gentleman friend with the elephant ear and the green eyes?”
“Search me,” Francis laughed. “But this I do know: those green eyes of
the elephant-eared one are the largest emeralds I’ve ever seen or
dreamed of. Each of them is really too large to possess fair carat
value. They should be crown jewels or nothing.”
“But a couple of emeralds and a couple of rubies, no matter what size,
should not constitute the totality of the Maya treasure,” Henry
contended. “We’re across the threshold of it, and yet we lack the key——”
“Which the old Maya, back on the barking sands, undoubtedly holds in
that sacred tassel of his,” Leoncia said. “Except for these two statues
and the bones on the floor, the place is bare.”
As she spoke, she advanced to look the male statue over more closely.
The grotesque ear centered her attention, and she pointed into it as she
added: “I don’t know about the key, but there is the key-hole.”
True enough, the elephantine ear, instead of enfolding an orifice as an
ear of such size should, was completely blocked up save for a small
aperture that not too remotely resembled a key-hole. They wandered
vainly about the chamber, tapping the walls and floor, seeking for
cunningly-hidden passageways or unguessable clues to the hiding place of
the treasure.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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