"In sixty years you are the first to find this buried city. In
a thousand no denizen of this valley has ever left it, and within
the memory of man, or even in their legends, none had found them
prior to my coming other than a single warlike giant, the story of
whom has been handed down from father to son.
"I think from the description that he must have been a Spaniard,
a giant of a man in buckler and helmet, who fought his way through
the terrible forest to the city gate, who fell upon those who were
sent out to capture him and slew them with his mighty sword. And
when he had eaten of the vegetables from the gardens, and the fruit
from the trees and drank of the water from the stream, he turned
about and fought his way back through the forest to the mouth of
the gorge. But though he escaped the city and the forest he did
not escape the desert. For a legend runs that the king, fearful
that he would bring others to attack them, sent a party after him
to slay him.
"For three weeks they did not find him, for they went in the wrong
direction, but at last they came upon his bones picked clean by
the vultures, lying a day's march up the same gorge through which
you and I entered the valley. I do not know," continued the old
woman, "that this is true. It is just one of their many legends."
"Yes," said the girl, "it is true.
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