It seemed incredible. How and by whom had it been created? How and by whom could it have been destroyed? I could not believe her. I felt sure the thing was a natural, a mysterious, an inexplicable phenomenon, and that she was merely repeating some ancient myth or prophecy. Determined to learn the truth, to discover the source, the cause of the luminous bridge, I hurried towards the opening in the mountain side. The way was still illuminated by the soft glow, and having discovered the bed of radioactive clay, as I believed it to be, I assumed the light came from some similar material in the rock. My examination of the walls confirmed this. Minute particles of black were visible in the reddish rock, and I noticed that where these were most numerous, the tunnel was most brightly illuminated. But when at last we came to the vast chasm, I stopped in utter amazement. It yawned before us, terrific, black, bottomless, with no sign of the gleaming, multicolored beam of effulgence spanning its depths like a bridge built of a rainbow. But my amazement, my wonder, was forgotten in my realization of what it meant. All retreat from the valley was cut off! No matter what happened, I was doomed to remain forever in Mictolan. I had no doubt that Kinchi Haman was responsible. Somehow, by some unknown, some almost magic power, he could control the bridge of light. He suspected me. He had no desire that I should escape, until such time as he saw fit to lead his people from the valley. And I was convinced that he would never do that, that he had no faith in the prophecy and that he knew far more of the outside world than I suspected or that anyone dreamed of. To be sure, he had been as terrified of my pistol as any of his people, and I felt sure he was wholly unfamiliar with firearms; but that did not prove that he had not, by some means, learned that the white men had overrun the land, that it would be impossible for his people ever to regain their country and to restore the old order of things as provided in the Book of Kukulcan, and that, knowing this, he intended to keep me a prisoner and, by cutting off all possible means of escape, to put an effectual stop to his people attempting to leave the valley. Intuitively I had been suspicious of him from the very first, intuitively I had felt that he did not believe me other than a mortal, a stranger; but even my intuition fell far short of the truth. I reflected, however, that both Itza and the prince had known beforehand that the bridge of light was no longer there. So perhaps, after all, the priest--if indeed he were responsible for its disappearance--had had no ulterior motive for removing it. I questioned them both, but the only reply I got was that it was tradition, common knowledge, that with the coming of the long-expected messenger, the bridge would vanish. “But then,” I asked, “how will the people of Mictolan go forth when the time shall come, as foretold in the prophecy?”