Chapter 7

All around the room were ranged great plaster casts of massive, vermiculated blocks of stone covered with elaborate carvings and with hieroglyphics. Charts set thickly with symbols hung on the wall above rows of shelves filled with books. “In there,” said Whelan, “my assistants are helping me to decipher the hieroglyphic inscriptions of a very ancient and wonderful civilisation,—the Maya. “A thousand years before Christ a civilised people lived in Central America, Miss Dirck. They had priests, they had astronomers,…