hastening back across the valley toward the cliffs they had scaled
the day before. But at length, by dint of commands, and threats
that he would enter the city alone, they agreed to accompany him.

For fifteen minutes they marched along the face of the wall before
they discovered a means of ingress. Then they came to a narrow
cleft about twenty inches wide. Within, a flight of concrete steps,
worn hollow by centuries of use, rose before them, to disappear at
a sharp turning of the passage a few yards ahead.

Into this narrow alley Tarzan made his way, turning his giant
shoulders sideways that they might enter at all. Behind him trailed
his black warriors. At the turn in the cleft the stairs ended,
and the path was level; but it wound and twisted in a serpentine
fashion, until suddenly at a sharp angle it debouched upon a narrow
court, across which loomed an inner wall equally as high as the
outer. This inner wall was set with little round towers alternating
along its entire summit with pointed monoliths. In places these
had fallen, and the wall was ruined, but it was in a much better
state of preservation than the outer wall.

Another narrow passage led through this wall, and at its end
Tarzan and his warriors found themselves in a broad avenue, on the
opposite side of which crumbling edifices of hewn granite loomed
dark and forbidding. Upon the crumbling debris along the face of
the buildings trees had grown, and vines wound in and out of the
hollow, staring windows; but the building directly opposite them
seemed less overgrown than the others, and in a much better state
of preservation. It was a massive pile, surmounted by an enormous
dome. At either side of its great entrance stood rows of tall