would have me in his grasp. Coming out of the shadows
of the woods and the deeper shadows of the sunken path to this wide open
space, where the light of the brilliant sunset was reflected strongly
from masses of rosy clouds over all the eastern sky, I could see
clearly. In the midst of the opening, not far from the edge of the
stupendous precipice, where the bare rock dropped sheer down a thousand
feet or more, was a huge bowlder that had been cut and squared with
ineffective tools into the rude semblance of a mighty altar. The
well-worn path along which I had come told the rest of the story. Here
was the temple, having for its roof the great arch of heaven, in which
the Indians, whom the gentle Fray Antonio believed to be such good
Christians, truly worshipped their true gods; even as here their fathers
had worshipped before them in the very dawning of the ancient past.

A tremor of joy went through me as I realized what I had found. Here was
positive proof of what I had strongly but not surely hoped for. The
Aztec faith truly was still a living faith; and it followed almost
certainly that, could I but penetrate the mystery with which it was
hedged about so carefully by them still faithful to it, I would find
all that I sought--of living customs, of coherent traditions--wherewith
to exhibit clearly to the world of the nineteenth century the wonderful
social and religious structure that the Spaniards of the sixteenth
century had blotted out, but had not destroyed. What my
fellow-archaeologists had accomplished in Syria, in Egypt, in Greece, was
nothing to what I could thus accomplish in Mexico. At the best, Smith,
Rawlinson, Schliemann, had done no more than stir the dust above the
surface of dead antiquity; but I was about to bring the past freshly and
brightly into the very midst of the present, and to make antiquity once
more alive!

As I stood there in the dusk of the narrow pathway, while the joy that
was in my heart swelled it almost to bursting, there came to my ears the
low moaning of one in pain. The faint, uncertain sound seemed to come
from the direction of the great stone altar. To discover myself in that
place to any of the Indians, I knew would end my archaeological ambition
very summarily; yet was I moved by a natural desire to aid whoever thus
was hurting and suffering. I stood irresolute a moment, and then, as the
moaning came to me again, I went out boldly into the open space, and
crossed it to where