IX

of directions, a folder that came with our type of tent heater, and a sprinkling of crumpled papers.

It was all bad enough, but when we smoothed out the papers and looked at what was on them we felt we had come to the worst. We had found certain inexplicably blotted papers at the camp which might have prepared us, yet the effect of the sight, down there in the prehuman vaults of a nightmare city, was almost too much to bear.

A mad Gedney might have made the groups of dots in imitation of those found on the greenish soapstones, just as the dots on those insane five-pointed grave mounds might have been made; and he might conceivably have prepared rough, hasty sketches⁠—varying in their accuracy⁠—or lack of it⁠—which outlined the neighboring parts of the city and traced the way from a circularly represented place outside our previous route⁠—a place we identified as a great cylindrical tower in the carvings and as a vast circular gulf glimpsed in our aerial survey⁠—to the present five-pointed structure and the tunnel mouth therein.