“What is that?” asked Bickley again.

I made no answer, for I was thinking.  Bastin, however, replied: 

“It’s difficult to be sure in this light, but I should think that it may be the remains of a cage in which some people who lived here kept monkeys, or perhaps it was an aviary.  Look at those little ladders for the monkeys to climb by, or possibly for the birds to sit on.”

“Are you sure it wasn’t tame angels?” asked Bickley.

“What a ridiculous remark!  How can you keep an angel in a cage?  I—­”

“Aeroplane!” I almost whispered to Bickley.

“You’ve got it!” he answered.  “The framework of an aeroplane and a jolly large one, too.  Only why hasn’t it oxidised?”

“Some indestructible metal,” I suggested.  “Gold, for instance, does not oxidise.”

He nodded and said: 

“We shall have to dig it out.  The dust is feet thick about it; we can do nothing without spades.  Come on.”

We went round to the end of the structure, whatever it might be, and presently came to another.  Again we went on and came to another, all of them being berthed exactly in line.

“What did I tell you?” said Bickley in a voice of triumph.  “A whole garage full, a regular fleet of aeroplanes!”

“That must be nonsense,” said Bastin, “for I am quite sure that these Orofenans cannot make such things.  Indeed they have no metal, and even cut the throats of pigs with wooden knives.”

Now I began to walk forward, bearing to the left so as to regain our former line.  We could do nothing with these metal skeletons, and I felt that there must be more to find beyond.  Presently I saw something looming ahead of me and quickened my pace, only to recoil.  For there, not thirty feet away and perhaps three hundred yards from the mouth of the cave, suddenly appeared what looked like a gigantic man.  Tommy saw it also and barked as dogs do when they are frightened, and the sound of his yaps echoed endlessly from every quarter, which scared him to silence.  Recovering myself I went forward, for now I guessed the truth.  It was not a man but a statue.

The thing stood upon a huge base which lessened by successive steps, eight of them, I think, to its summit.  The foot of this base may have been a square of fifty feet or rather more; the real support or pedestal of the statue, however, was only a square of about six feet.  The figure itself was little above life-size, or at any rate above our life-size, say seven feet in height.  It was very peculiar in sundry ways.

To begin with, nothing of the body was visible, for it was swathed like a corpse.  From these wrappings projected one arm, the right, in the hand of which was the likeness of a lighted torch.  The head was not veiled.  It was that of a man, long-nosed, thin-lipped, stern-visaged; the countenance pervaded by an awful and unutterable calm, as deep as that of Buddha only less benign.  On the brow was a