devil and at the cost of a human soul.

Had there been any signs at all of human life about this solemn and
majestic building, or upon the mountain-top whereon it stood, the
chilling hold that it took upon our imaginations would have been less
strong. What wrought upon us was the deadly silence, and the absolute
stillness of everything save the drifting clouds. It seemed to us as
though we had come out from the living world and our own time into a
dead region belonging to a long dead past; and I remembered with a
shudder that we had entered this region through that gloomy cavern,
where hundreds of the ancient dead were clustered in silent worship
about the great silent idol carved in everlasting stone. It seemed as
though some evil spell hung over us, that doomed us forever to wander in
wild solitudes--which were the more appalling because constantly uprose
before us tangible evidence of the strong current of eager human life
that had pulsed through them in former times. Young but put into his own
rough language the thought that was in all our hearts when he declared,
with a great oath, that for the sake of getting safe out of this lonely
hole he'd contract to fight Indians three days in every week for the
rest of his life, and be glad to do it for the comfort of having
somebody around who was alive.

XVI.

AT THE BARRED PASS.

The whole top of the mountain, near a mile square, had been so levelled
by nature that little remained to be done for its further smoothing by
the hand of man. But the amount of work that had gone into the mere
preparation for the building of the great temple was almost incredible.
In the centre of the plateau a pyramidal mass of rock near a thousand
feet square, of a piece with the mountain itself, had been so shaped and
hewn that it rose in three great terraces to the square apex on which
the temple stood. These terraces slanted upward, surrounding the pyramid
by a continuously ascending way that had its beginning and its ending in
the centre of the eastern front--so that, allowing for the diminishing
size of the pyramid, the distance by this way from the bottom to the top
of it was more than a mile and a half.

"It just took a slow-goin', lazy heathen Greaser t' think out a thing
like this," Young observed as we went up the path. "Now, if th'
Congregationalists that I was brought up among had put a church on a
place like this--an' they wouldn't have been likely t' be fools enough