through the little Mayan village and heard Katchilcan’s droning voice relating the ancient prophecy in the soft guttural Zutugil. As plainly as though it were actually before my eyes, I saw the nude body of the Indian girl, charred and seared upon the altar of the temple on the mountain. I seemed to feel the bonds cutting into my flesh, to see the flash of Maliche’s upraised obsidian knife. Then the terrible cañon, the Valley of Death, the horrible Tunnel of Serpents, the nightmarish Pool of the Alligators. Again, in my strangely disordered mind, I traversed the scorching, glaring deserts; in my ears rang the unearthly cry of the great pterodactyl. I shuddered as the vision of the awful dinosaur with Maliche’s headless body in his talons rose before me. All had come to pass; all that the prophecy had foretold, all that was written and pictured in the Book of Kukulcan had been borne out, and now I was in the Cave of the Bats, was racing onward, following the streaming smoke of my last torch. No doubt it was the hypnotic effect of gazing steadily at the light that produced the visions; yet I was not dreaming. I was fully awake. One portion of my brain was normal, living in the present, alive to my dangers, to the rapidly diminishing torch; the other half seemed detached, moving back through time, seeing each and every detail of all that I had passed through. I can compare it only to that period between wakefulness and sleep when one dreams impossible things yet knows that one is dreaming. And so thoroughly aware was I that the mental visions were not realities that when I saw a strangely greenish wavering light, I felt it was a part of the phantasma. BUT the next moment I knew it was no vision. About me the cavern was bathed in a peculiar glow, a soft light that seemed to change from green to blue, to purple, to pink, to red, to yellow--to pass, through every color of the spectrum exactly like the lights thrown upon the curtain of a theatre by multicolored electric lights. With a sharp cry, as the last flicker of the torch burned my fingers, I cast it aside. No need of it now. I could see plainly. The cavern had narrowed. The roof was barely ten feet above my head, the walls were within reach of my outstretched hands. I was in a tunnel, and before me, streaming through a semicircular opening, was the remarkable prismatic glow. I was safe. I had found an exit. Before me was the open air. I dashed forward towards the opening, gave a horrified yell and checked myself in the nick of time. Beyond the opening yawned a vast, black, fathomless abyss!