moment whether what he beheld was reality or the
effect of a disordered imagination.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

HOW PHIL ENCOUNTERED A MOST MARVELLOUS ADVENTURE.

The place in which Stukely now found himself was a perfectly open glade
of about forty acres in extent, carpeted with rich, luscious grass, such
as the antelope loves to feed upon, without a tree or shrub of any kind
upon it. It was not this, however, which excited his astonishment, for
such glades were by no means uncommon even in the densest parts of the
South American forest; nor was it that, immediately facing him, on the
opposite side of the glade, towered a bare, vertical stretch of porphyry
cliff towering up full three hundred feet into the cloudless blue. But
it was the unique spectacle which the face of that cliff afforded that
excited the Englishman's admiration and astonishment, for it was
sculptured all over, from base to summit, with boldly executed figures
of men, women, and animals, which, when his admiration had passed
sufficiently to enable him to study them in detail, seemed to Stukely to
tell some sort of a story. But what the story was he was quite unable
to puzzle out, for there were hunting episodes depicted, and also scenes
which seemed to represent some sort of religious ceremonial, while
others, again, might be interpreted as representing either a human
sacrifice, or, possibly, the execution of a criminal; for they
represented a group of men thrusting forward by a long pole another,
whose hands were bound behind him, toward a great uncouth-looking
monster that was emerging from a pool and advancing ponderously toward
the unwilling victim with widely opened, cavernous jaws thickly set with
most formidable-looking teeth. The figures were executed in rather high
relief, and there was a certain quaintness and stiffness of outline in
their delineation that marked them as the work of an untutored artist,
yet the action of them was depicted with a spirit and vigour which
proved that the sculptor, although untutored, was undoubtedly a keen
student of nature. Altogether, it was by far the most surprising thing
of its kind that Stukely had ever seen, and he stood for a long time
studying the various tableaux, and wondering why in the world anyone
should have thought it worth while to spend the best part of a lifetime
in carving in the stubborn rock so elaborate a series of pictures, where
probably no one but an occasional wandering Indian woul