As the moon crossed the opening of the shaft its light flooded the whole interior, and then Tarzan saw directly across from him another opening in the opposite wall.
He wondered if this might not be the mouth of a passage leading to possible escape.It would be worth investigating, at least, and this he determined to do.
Quickly returning to the wall he had demolished to explore what lay beyond it, he carried the stones into the passageway and replaced them from that side.The deep deposit of dust which he had noticed upon the blocks as he had first removed them from the wall had convinced him that even if the present occupants of the ancient pile had knowledge of this hidden passage they had made no use of it for perhaps generations.
The wall replaced, Tarzan turned to the shaft, which was some fifteen feet wide at this point.To leap across the intervening space was a small matter to the ape-man, and a moment later he was proceeding along a narrow tunnel, moving cautiously for fear of being precipitated into another shaft such as he had just crossed.
He had advanced some hundred feet when he came to a flight of steps leading downward into Stygian gloom.
Some twenty feet below, the level floor of the tunnel recommenced, and shortly afterward his progress was stopped by a heavy wooden door which was secured by massive wooden bars upon the side of Tarzan's approach.This fact suggested to the ape-man that he might surely be in a passageway leading to the outer world, for the bolts, barring progress from the opposite side, tended to substantiate this hypothesis, unless it were merely a prison to which it led.
Along the tops of the bars were deep layers of dust--a further indication that the passage had lain long unused.As he pushed the massive obstacle aside, its great hinges shrieked out in weird protest against this unaccustomed disturbance.
For a moment Tarzan paused to listen for any responsive note which might indicate that the unusual night noise had alarmed the inmates of the temple; but as he heard nothing he advanced beyond the doorway.
Carefully feeling about, he found himself within a large chamber, along the walls of which, and down the length of the floor, were piled many tiers of metal ingots of an odd though uniform shape.To his groping hands they felt not unlike double-headed bootjacks.The ingots were quite heavy, and but for the enormous number of them he would have been positive that they were gold; but the thought of the fabulous wealth these thousands of pounds of metal would have represented were they in reality gold, almost convinced him that they must be of some baser metal.
At the far end of the chamber he discovered another barred door, and again the bars upon the inside renewed the hope that he was traversing an ancient and forgotten passageway to liberty.Beyond the door the passage ran straight as a war spear, and it soon became evident to the ape-man that it had already led him beyond the outer walls of the temple.If he but knew the direction it was leading him! If toward the west, then he must also be beyond the city's outer walls.
With increasing hopes he forged ahead as rapidly as he dared, until at the end of half an hour he came to another flight of steps leading upward.At the bottom this flight was of concrete, but as he ascended his naked feet felt a sudden change in the substance they were treading.
The steps of concrete had given place to steps of granite.
Feeling with his hands, the ape-man discovered that these latter were evidently hewed from rock, for there was no crack to indicate a joint.
For a hundred feet the steps wound spirally up, until at a sudden turning Tarzan came into a narrow cleft between two rocky walls.Above him shone the starry sky, and before him a steep incline replaced the steps that had terminated at its foot.Up this pathway Tarzan hastened, and at its upper end came out upon the rough top of a huge granite bowlder.
A mile away lay the ruined city of Opar, its domes and turrets bathed in the soft light of the equatorial moon.
Tarzan dropped his eyes to the ingot he had brought away with him.For a moment he examined it by the moon's bright rays, then he raised his head to look out upon the ancient piles of crumbling grandeur in the distance.
"Opar," he mused, "Opar, the enchanted city of a dead and forgotten past.The city of the beauties and the beasts.
City of horrors and death; but--city of fabulous riches."The ingot was of virgin gold.
The bowlder on which Tarzan found himself lay well out in the plain between the city and the distant cliffs he and his black warriors had scaled the morning previous.To descend its rough and precipitous face was a task of infinite labor and considerable peril even to the ape-man; but at last he felt the soft soil of the valley beneath his feet, and without a backward glance at Opar he turned his face toward the guardian cliffs, and at a rapid trot set off across the valley.
The sun was just rising as he gained the summit of the flat mountain at the valley's western boundary.Far beneath him he saw smoke arising above the tree-tops of the forest at the base of the foothills.
"Man," he murmured."And there were fifty who went forth to track me down.Can it be they?"Swiftly he descended the face of the cliff, and, dropping into a narrow ravine which led down to the far forest, he hastened onward in the direction of the smoke.Striking the forest's edge about a quarter of a mile from the point at which the slender column arose into the still air, he took to the trees.Cautiously he approached until there suddenly burst upon his view a rude BOMA, in the center of which, squatted about their tiny fires, sat his fifty black Waziri.
He called to them in their own tongue:
"Arise, my children, and greet thy king!"With exclamations of surprise and fear the warriors leaped to their feet, scarcely knowing whether to flee or not.