José — page 209: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

202 JOSE. the two captors until they retired to the tepee; then, to make sure of Green’s place of confinement, he began counting the lodges in both directions, whereupon he straightened up and _ painfully stretched his stiffened joints. The moon was now rising along the dark, solemn sky, flooding with silvery splendor the jumbled masses of gray rocks, towering upward in level terraces, now assuming the shape of monstrous coffins, cubes, and obelisks, now sharply contrasting with gloomy shadows and again mingling into a suffusion of tints—only a dead, barren solitude, as though, the creating hand had excluded this vast district from its benign in- fluence. The young man had barely cast a cursory glance athwart the singular scene, when the gigantic form of the old hunter suddenly hove in view. “You have doubtless grown impatient,” he said, approaching. “But dangerous missions require time. Have you seen anything surprising down below?” Baumann gave a vivid account of his discovery to which Bob listened with keen interest, then gazed thoughtfully down at his feet a minute. “YT shall want you to give me a minute description of certain things,” he said, contracting his brows. “Come now, that we may have a short time to sleep—ere the moon has run her course our work must be done!” Silently he turned into the gorge, and after a few paces scaled a sharp angle of the rock, Baumann involuntarily wondering at the agility of the giant, and soon both were standing on a ledge which, possibly six feet wide, extended in a horizontal posi- tion for some distance along the side of the massive (E(0) GomIicbooks