Wilson led the way out. Before they left the cave Stubbs turned. He
saw the image once again, and once again the stone. The temptation
was too great, especially now that they were on the point of
leaving--perhaps forever. He started back and Wilson tried to check
him.

"I wouldn't, Stubbs. Those eyes look too ugly. It is only the mouth
that smiles and----"

"Ye haven't turned heathen yerself, have ye?" he called back.

He stepped forward and clutched it. But the jewel was fastened in some
way although it seemed a bit loose. He pulled strongly upon it and the
next second leaped back, warned in time by a suspicious rumbling above
his head. He looked down to see a slab of granite weighing half a ton
on the spot where he had stood a moment before. It was an ingenious
bit of mechanism arranged to protect the treasure; the jewel had been
attached by a stout cord which, when pulled, loosed the weight above.
Not only this, but it became evident in a few seconds that it loosed
also other forces--whether by design or chance, the two men never
determined. They had pressed back to the path outside the cave, when
they heard a rumble like distant thunder, followed instantly by a
grinding and crashing. Before their eyes a large section of the cliff
crashed down over the cave itself and into the chasm below. They
didn't wait to see what followed, but made their way along the path as
fast as they dared.

Neither man spoke again until a half hour later after a journey that
was like a passage through Hell, they lay exhausted in the sunlight
above the chasm. The thunder of tumbling rock still pounded at their
ears.

CHAPTER XXIV

_Those in the Hut_

In an angle formed by two cliff sides, within a stone's throw of the
lake of Guadiva, a native, Flores by name, had built himself a hut.
Here he lived with his mate Lotta in a little Nirvana of his own,
content with his love and his task of tending a flock of sheep which
furnished them both with food and clothing. Few came near this hut.
The sky above, the lake before, and the mountains round about were all
his, his and his alone even as was the love of the dark-eyed woman
near him. Within their simple lives they had sounded the depths of
despair and reached the heights of bliss.

The woman Lotta was the daughter of a chieftain of the tribe of
Chibca, one whose ancestry went far back into the history of the
Golden One. Some of them had been priests, some of them guards, and