Читать книгу The City of the Sacred Well онлайн

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“On my eminence I turned slowly and gazed out over the dead city. Here and there, some near by and some at a distance, were a dozen other pyramids surmounted by buildings. A few seemed well preserved, others were in picturesque ruins, all ghostly white in the moonlight, except where a doorway or a shadow stood out in inky blackness. I could see the long shadow of that old temple we call the ‘Nunnery.’ The stillness was broken only by the monotonous hum of hidden cicadas; or was it the distant beat of phantom tunkuls, or sacred drums, warning that the ancient God of the Feathered Serpent did but sleep and might at any moment awake?

“And then my eyes were caught and held by a broad raised roadway leading straight away from the temple toward a vast black pool overgrown with trees. Breathless, frozen to the spot, I could only look and look, for in a blinding flash I realized that I was gazing at the Sacred Way, and at its end the Sacred Well in whose murky depths even then might lie the pitiful bones of many once lovely maidens sacrificed to appease a grim god. What untold treasures this grisly well might hide! What tragedies had been enacted at its brink!