Very impressive were the old priest’s words. There was something indescribably convincing about his manner, perhaps something hypnotic. There, in the ancient room, with the ancient priest so like a Mayan sculptured figure, with the still more ancient codex--the Book of Kukulcan--in my hands, there seemed nothing improbable, nothing incongruous in his story. The prophecy seemed very real. Though under any other circumstances, among any other surroundings, I might have scoffed at it all, might have put the whole thing down as a fanciful myth, yet there, with the words of Katchilcan in my ears, somehow I felt a conviction that I was destined to find that hidden spot called Mictolan, that the whole chain of circumstances, from finding the codex in the book at Vigo to my coming to this village and meeting Katchilcan, seemed destiny and fate, and that I would fulfill that destiny. Strange as it may appear now, at the time it never occurred to me that I might fail, that, having no definite knowledge of the site of Mictolan, if for that matter there was such a spot, I might never find it. And, quite as though I had planned to do so from the beginning, I at once set about making preparations to start on what, to me in my sober senses, would have appeared the wildest of wild goose chases, the most preposterous of adventures. CHAPTER III The Valley of Death OLD Katchilcan seemed to take it as a matter of course that I would set out to carry the codex to Mictolan. That, however, was only natural, for he believed implicitly in the prophecy, the legend and the codex, and so believing, he had equal faith in my being the chosen means of carrying the foreordained word to the hidden people. In fact, as the days passed, I became absolutely convinced myself that there was far more than a foundation of fact in the priest’s story. There was the codex. If I could obtain the key to it from Katchilcan, I could decipher much of it myself. In fact, now that I examined it from the new viewpoint, I marveled that one of the many experts who had studied it, had not deciphered it. To be sure they had come very close to solving the riddle. They had recognized it as dealing with Kukulcan, they had declared it a record of a migration and a place, they had decided that it was a combination of religious, historical and geographical symbols, and they had even suggested that it was a key to some other codex. And in these surmises they had been correct. It dealt with all--Kukulcan, a migration, a locality, a prophecy, and it _was_ a key or a symbol, though the most important part of that symbol--the location of the hidden city of Mictolan, was missing.