Two doorways, one on each of the faces which looked into the enclosure, offered ingress.  They were similar in size and shape, seven feet and a half in height by four in breadth, and tapering toward the summit like the portals of the temple-builders of Central America.  Inside were solid mud floors, strewn with gray dust and showing here and there a gleam of broken pottery, the whole brooded over by obscurity.  It was discoverable, however, that the room within was of considerable height and size.

There was a hesitation about entering.  It seemed as if the ghosts of the nameless people forbade it.  This had been the abode of men who perhaps inhabited America before the coming of Columbus.  Here possibly the ancestors of Montezuma had stayed their migrations from the mounds of the Ohio to the pyramids of Cholula and Tenochtitlan.  Or here had lived the Moquis, or the Zunians, or the Lagunas, before they sought refuge from the red tribes of the north upon the buttes south of the Sierra del Carrizo.  Here at all events had once palpitated a civilization which was now a ghost.

“This is to be our home for a little while,” said Thurstane to Clara.  “Will you dismount?  I will run in and turn out the snakes, if there are any.  Sergeant, keep your men and a few others ready to repel an attack.  Now, fellows, off with the packs.”

Producing a couple of wax tapers, he lighted them, handed one to Coronado, and led the way into the silent Casa de Montezuma.  They were in a hall about ten feet high, fifteen feet broad, and forty feet long, which evidently ran across the whole front of the building.  The walls were hard-finished and adorned with etchings in vermilion of animals, geometrical figures, and nondescript grotesques, all of the rudest design and disposed without regard to order.  A doorway led into a small central room, and from that doorways opened into three more rooms, one on each side.

The ceilings of all the rooms were supported by unhewn beams, five or six inches thick, deeply inserted into the adobe walls.  In the ceiling of the rearmost hall (the one which had no direct outlet upon the enclosure) was a trapdoor which offered the only access to the stories above.  A rude but solid ladder, consisting of two beams with steps chopped into them, was still standing here.  With a vague sense of intrusion, half expecting that the old inhabitants would appear and order them away, Thurstane and Coronado ascended.  The second story resembled the first, and above was another of the same pattern.  Then came a nearly flat roof; and here they found something remarkable.  It was a solid sheathing or tiling, made of slates of baked and glazed pottery, laid with great exactness, admirably cemented and projecting well over the eaves.  This it was which had enabled the adobes beneath to endure for years, and perhaps for centuries, in spite of the lapping of rains and the gnawing of winds.