Polder and I were exultant; and yet I think that we both shivered with a curious terror when we tried to read certain inscriptions that were still deeply engraved on the worn stones. No living man, tho erudite in all the tongues of Earth, could have deciphered those characters; and perhaps it was their very alienage that frightened us. We had sought diligently during laborious years for all that transcends the dead level of mortality through age or remoteness or strangeness; we had longed ardently for the esoteric and bizarre; but such longing was not incompatible with tear and repulsion. Better than those who had walked always in the common paths, we knew the perils that might attend our exorbitant and solitary researches. Often we had debated, with variously fantastic conjectures, the enigma of the mountain builded city. But, toward our journey's end, when the vestiges of that pristine people multiplied around us, we fell into long periods of silence, sharing the taciturnity of our stolid guide. Thoughts came to us that were overly strange for utterance; the chill of elder aeons entered our hearts from the ruins--and did not depart. We toiled on between the desolate rocks and the sterile heavens, breathing an air that became thin and painful to the lungs, as if with some admixture of cosmic ether. At high noon we reached an open pass, and saw before and above us, at the end of a long and quickly opened perspective, the city that had been described as an unnamed ruin in a volume antedating all other known books. The place was built on an inner peak of the range, surrounded by snowless summits little sterner and loftier than itself. On one side the peak fell in a thousand-foot precipice from the overhanging ramparts; on another, it was terraced with wild cliffs; but the third side, facing toward us, was a steep acclivity with broken-down scarps and chimneys that would offer small difficulty to expert mountaineers. The rock of the whole mountain was strangely ruinous and black; but the city walls, tho gapped and worn to a like dilapidation, were conspicuous at a distance of leagues. Polder and I beheld the bourn of our world-wide search with thoughts and emotions which we did not voice. The Indian made no comment, pointing impassively toward the far summit with its crown of ruins. We hurried on, wishing to complete our journey by daylight; and plunging into an abysmal valley, we began at mid-afternoon the ascent of the slope toward the city.