"Hyne,.C.J.Cutcliffe.-.Lost.Continent.-.Lostc10" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hyne C J Cutcliffe)

"Of course I have. What do you think I've been doing all this
time?"

"No, don't come down yet. Wait a minute. I say, old man, do
wait a minute. I'm making fast the kodak and the flashlight
apparatus on the end of the rope. Pull them up, and just make me
half a dozen exposures, there's a good fellow."

"Oh, all right," I said, and hauled the things up, and got them
inside. The photographs would be absolutely dull and
uninteresting, but that wouldn't matter to Coppinger. He rather
preferred them that way. One has to be careful about halation in
photographing these dark interiors, but there was a sort of ledge
like a seat by the side of each doorway, and so I lodged the camera
on that to get a steady stand, and snapped off the flashlight from
behind and above.

I got pictures of four of the chambers this way, and then came
to one where the ledge was higher and wider. I put down the
camera, wedged it level with scraps of stone, and then sat down
myself to recharge the flashlight machine. But the moment my
weight got on that ledge, there was a sharp crackle, and down I
went half a dozen inches.

Of course I was up again pretty sharply, and snapped up the
kodak just as it was going to slide off to the ground. I will
confess, too, I was feeling pleased. Here at any rate was a
Guanche cupboard of sorts, and as they had taken the trouble to
hermetically seal it with cement, the odds were that it had
something inside worth hiding. At first there was nothing to be
seen but a lot of dust and rubble, so I lit a bit of candle and
cleared this away. Presently, however, I began to find that I was
shelling out something that was not cement. It chipped away, in
regular layers, and when I took it to the daylight I found that
each layer was made up of two parts. One side was shiny staff that
looked like talc, and on this was smeared a coating of dark toffee-
coloured material, that might have been wax. The toffee-coloured
surface was worked over with some kind of pattern.

Now I do not profess to any knowledge on these matters, and as
a consequence took what Coppinger had told me about Guanche habits
and acquirements as more or less true. For instance, he had
repeatedly impressed upon me that this old people could not write,
and having this in my memory, I did not guess that the patterns
scribed through the wax were letters in some obsolete character,
which, if left to myself, probably I should have done. But still
at the same time I came to the conclusion that the stuff was worth
looting, and so set to work quarrying it out with the heel of my
boot and a pocket-knife.