"You wouldn't!" Ham said dryly. "If we should be forced down, you could take to the trees. The rest of us would have to walk. And a half mile a day is good walking in that country under us!"
Renny, up in the pilot's well with Doc, called: "Heads up, you eggs! We're getting close!"
Renny had checked their course figures again and again. He had calculated angles and inscribed lines on the map. And they were nearing their destination, the tract of land that was Doc's legacy! It lay directly ahead.
And ahead was a mountain range more nodular and sheer than any they had sighted yet. Its foothill peaks were like stone needles. To the rampant sides of the mountains clung stringy patches of jungle, fighting for existence.
The great speed plane bucked like a plains cayuse as it encountered the tremendous air currents set up by the precipitous wastes of stone below. This in spite of Doc's masterful hand at the controls. An ordinary pilot would have succumbed to such treacherous currents, or prudently turned back.
It was as though they were flying the tumultuous heart of a vast cyclone.
Monk, hanging tightly to a wicker seat, which was in turn strapped with metal to the plane fuselage, had become somewhat green under his ruddy brick complexion. Plainly, he had changed his ideas about the ease of their exploration method. Not that he was scared. But he was about as seasick as man ever became.
"These devilish air currents explain why this region has not been mapped by plane," Doc offered.
Four or five minutes later, he leveled an arm. "Look! That canyon should lead to the center of this tract of land we're hunting!"
The eyes, all of them, followed Doc's pointing arm.
A narrow-walled gash that seemed to sink a limitless depth into the mountain met their gaze. This cut was of bare stone, too steep and too flintlike in hardness to support even a trace of green growth.
The plane careened closer.
So deep was the gash of a canyon that twilight swathed the lower recesses. Renny, keen of eye and using binoculars, advised: "There is quite a stream of water running in the bottom of the canyon."
Fearlessly, Doc nosed the plane down. Another pilot would have banked away in terror from those malicious air currents. Doc, however, knew just how much his plane could stand. Although the craft might be tossed about a great deal, they were all as yet quite safe as long as Doc's hand was on the controls.
Into the monster slash of a chasm, the plane rumbled its way. The motor thunder was tossed back in waves from the frowning walls. Suddenly air, cooled by the small river rushing through the cut and thus contracting and forming a down current, seemed to suck the plane into the depths. Wheeling, twisting, the speed ship plummeted among murky shadows.
Monk was now a striking example of the contention that sudden danger will cure seasickness for he was entirely normal again.
Doc had the throttles against the wide-open pins. The three radial motors moaned and labored, and the exhaust pipes lipped blue flame.
The progress of the craft along the chasm was a procession of leaps and drops and side-whippings, as though they were riding an amusement-park jack rabbit, or roller coaster.
"It'll be a long old day before another gang of white explorers penetrate into this place!" Renny prophesied.
Doc's arm suddenly leveled like a bronze bar.
"The Valley of the Vanished!" he cried.
QUITE suddenly, it had appeared before them the Valley of the Vanished!
A widening in the strange, devilish chasm formed it. The valley had roughly the shape of an egg. The floor was sloping, of such a steepness that to land a wheel-equipped plane on it would be an impossibility.
There was only one spot of comparative levelness, and that was no greater than an acre or two in area.
It was on this level spot that the eyes of Doc and his five men instantly focused. They stared, unbelieving.
"Good Heaven!" gasped Johnny, the archaeologist.
From the little flat towered a pyramid! It adhered in a general way to the architecture of the Egyptian type of pyramids, but there were differences.
For one thing, the sides, instead of drawing inward in a series of steplike shelves, were smoothed as glass from top to bottom. Only in the front was there a flight of steps. Not more than twenty feet wide was this flight, and the steps were less high and deep than those in an American home. The stairway was like a ribbon up the glittering, sleek side of the pyramid.
The top of the structure was flat, and on this stood a sort of temple, a flat stone roof supported by square, wondrously carved pillars. Except for the pillars, this was open at the sides, permitting glimpses of fantastically wrought idols of stone.
Strangest of all, perhaps, was the color of the pyramid. Of a grayish-brownstone, yet it glowed all over with a strange yellow, metallic aurora of tiny lights caught and cast back.
"Priceless!" murmured Johnny, the archaeologist.
"You said it!" grunted Renny, the engineer.
"From a historical standpoint, I mean!" corrected Johnny.
"I meant from a pocketbook standpoint!" Renny snorted. "If I ever saw quartz absolutely full of wire gold, I see it now. I'll bet the stone that pyramid is made of would mill fifty thousand dollars to the ton in free gold!"
"Forget the gold!" snapped Johnny. "Don't you realize you're looking at a rare sample of ancient Mayan architecture? Something any archaeologist would give both hands and a leg to inspect!"
As the plane dived closer, another thing about the pyramid became noticeable. This was a sizable volume of water which poured steadily down the pyramid side, coursing in a deep trough inlaid near the steps.
This water came out of the pyramid top by some artesian effect. Continuing away from the structure, it fed a long, narrow lake. This body of water in turn emptied into the stream that ran down the chasm up which Doc and his friends had flown.
Upon the sides of the egg-shaped valley, not far from the pyramid, stood rows of impressive stone houses. These were lavishly carved, strange of architecture. It was as though the flyers had slipped back into an age before history.
There were people many of them. They were garbed weirdly.
Doc dropped the plane pontoons on the narrow lake surface.
IT was an awed group of men who peered from the plane as it grounded floats on the clean white sand of the tiny beach.
The natives of this Valley of the Vanished were running down the steep sides to meet them. It was difficult to tell whether their reception was going to be warlike or not.
"Maybe we'd better unlimber a machine gun?" Renny suggested. "I don't like the looks of that gang getting together in front!"
"No!" Doc shook his head. "After all, we haven't any moral right here. And I'll get out rather than massacre some of them!"
Chapter 12. THE LEGACY
"But this land is all yours."
"In the eyes of civilized law, probably so," Doc agreed. "But there's another way of looking at it. It's a lousy trick for a government to take some poor savage's land away from him and give it to a white man to exploit. Our own American Indians got that kind of a deal, you know. Not that these people look so savage, though."
"They've got a pretty high type of civilization, if you ask me!" Renny declared "That's the cleanest little city I ever saw!"
The men fell to watching the on-coming natives.
"They're every one a pure Mayan!" Johnny declared. "No outside races have intermarried with these people!"
The approaching Mayans were going through a strange maneuver. The bulk of the populace was holding back to let a group of men, all of whom were garbed alike, come ahead.
These men were slightly larger in stature, more brute-like, of a thickness of shoulder and chest advertising powerful muscles. They wore a short mantle over the shoulders, a network of leather which had projecting ends rather like modern epaulets. They wore broad girdles of a dark blue, the ends of these forming aprons to the front and rear. Each man wore leggings not unlike football shin guards, and sandals which had extremely high backs.