"Yeah," muttered Mike Shinn. "Quell was a good guy. He was a great guy."
An hour later, Lurain suddenly reined in her horse and pointed eagerly ahead. "There is Dordona!"
Five miles ahead rose the eastern wall of the great crater, the mighty, looming barrier of the mountains. Close under the frowning cliffs brooded ancient, crumbling Dordona. Black, silent, brooding like a withered ancient who has long ago fallen from greatness, it lay in the chill white mists, strange contrast to the city from which they had come.
Behind the black battlements of an encircling wall whose top had crumbled at places, rose a mass of antique towers and roofs of dull black stone, weathered by the winds and rains of ages. Under a water-gate in the dilapidated wall ran the roaring, mill-race river they had followed. It ran straight toward a building at the center of the city, a huge black dome that towered two hundred feet into the air.
The gates in the black wall were pushed open as they approached. Soldiers in black armor waved their swords in the air and yelled joyful greetings to Lurain, riding now at the head of the little troop. And as they rode on into the city, from somber, crumbling buildings poured men and women with shouts of gladness.
"Lurain! The princess Lurain has returned!" they shouted.
Clark Stannard, looking about keenly, saw that indeed Dordona had long passed the zenith of its glory. Many of the black stone buildings were untenanted, falling to ruins. Green grass grew between the blocks of black paving in the streets.
And the people pouring forth were not nearly so numerous as the Reds, he saw. Clark sensed despair under their momentary joy, read hopelessness on their pale faces, the hopelessness of great fear.
"Say, we'll be the white-haired boys in this joint for bringing back the girl," Mike Shinn said happily.
"There aren't enough men here to defend this city properly," Lieutenant Morrow told Clark keenly. "The place is too big now for its population, and the wall hasn't been kept up."
Clark nodded grimly. "From what Thargo said, the population of this place has been steadily dwindling for a long time."
"We go to the Temple of the Shaft," Lurain called to Clark. "My father, the lord Kimor, will be there."
They rode after her toward the huge, black-domed temple that brooded at the center of the city. It loomed massively in front of them, incomparably the largest and most ancient building they had seen in this land. For it was old, the stone paving in front of it worn deep by ages of tramping feet, its slot-windows crumbling at the edges.
Guards took their horses, and swung open the high bronze doors of the temple. Lurain led the way inside, her slim, boyish figure striding with her sheathed sword rattling on the stone floor. Clark and his men, following her inside, paused for a moment, thunderstruck.
The interior of the temple was one co lossal room, dim and dusky and vast, its only illumination shafts of sunlight from the slot-like windows. And it was throbbing and quivering to a thunder of bellowing sound that was deafening, an unbroken, tremendous roar of waters.
The racing river from outside ran right into the temple, through a gap in one wall. The waters rushed with blinding speed across the floor of the vast room, in a deep, wide canal, toward a round, black opening a hundred feet across that yawned at the center of the floor. Into this gaping abyss, the river tumbled with a reverberating thunder.
