CHAPTER XXXIII SALT OF THE EARTH The effect of the great wave in the Valley had been extraordinary. When last they were there the whole place was a tangle of luxuriant undergrowth, ferns, mosses, lichens, pandanus, hibiscus, paw-paws, with stately palms waving gracefully above. Now the bed of the Valley was bare. The growths and the undergrowths had been torn off and swept away, and the newcomers were led wonderingly through the uncovered ruins of the city built by the men who set up the stone gods--along a wide street paved with stone blocks, which ran up the middle of the Valley with the stream flowing through it; past the foundations of great buildings; into an immense square where the denudation had been less complete. A certain amount of mud had silted down again on to the ruins. Nature was already at work covering up the scar of her latest wound. And the great stone gods sat gazing expectantly out to sea, as they had gazed when the city below still teemed with busy life; as they had gazed through all the long years since, while the ruins of the city slowly disappeared beneath the touch of the healing hand. The first party had found strange quarters in the uncovered basement of a building, which, from its size, had probably been a temple. It was a great quadrangle, and the head of the wide roadway that led from the sea ran right into it, and ended there. The upper end of the enclosure rose ten feet or more above the level, and was composed of great chiselled blocks of stone, and in this were cavernous square openings, the entrances of which now served as houses for these houseless strangers. They had appropriated four adjacent holes, and had made themselves as comfortable as circumstances permitted. The whole place had been covered in with wild growth, but the great wave foaming up the valley had swept it all bare. The apartments were not uncomfortable except in one respect. They ran so far back into the hillside that the ends of them had not yet been discovered. "And," said Aunt Jannet, peering into the shadows which the firelight quickened into ghostly life, "I'm always expecting something will come out, and either frighten us to death or eat us alive." Ha'o stood it for one night, with crumpled face and quick-glancing eyes, but next day he carried up some boards from the beach, and built a tiny lean-to outside for himself and Nai, and they found life more tolerable. Nothing ever came out of those mysterious passages for their undoing. What dark uses they may have served in the bygone times they could only surmise. One passage they followed till it issued in the cliffs behind the stone gods. The others ran straight into the heart of the mountain, with cross cuts leading round towards the city, and the uses they might have been put to in the hands of a priestly oligarchy were apparent.