The Black Stallion and the Lost City Read Online Free PDF Page B

thigh a couple times to get it working again. As he did, he noticed an odd, musty odor in the air, a smell that hadn’t been there when he left the room before.
    The light snapped on again, and Alec quickly realized that this wasn’t his room at all. He must have gotten turned around somehow and come to the wrong place. This looked like some sort of exhibit room. There were framed black-and-white photographs on the walls and broken pieces of statuary standing in the corners. Curiosity made him direct the beam of light to a pair of long, low glass and wooden display cases lining the walls on one side of the room.
    Inside the cabinets were what looked at first like vases and broken pots. As he looked closer through the glass front of one of the cases, he realized that the shelves were laden not with relics but with human skulls and bones.
    At first the sight of the old bones startled him, but then curiosity once again got the best of him, and he pointed the flashlight at the framed photographs on the wall. One showed a pair of monks holding shovels and standing in a garden. In a hole in the ground beside them were uncovered pieces of an ancient Greek statue.
    Alec stepped over to a wooden bookcase, its top shelf lined with old hardcover volumes, all written in Bulgarian, Greek and German. On a lower shelf was a stack of dusty pamphlets. The paper was brown and brittle with age, probably dating to the mid-twentieth century. Like the books, most of the pamphlets were written in languages Alec couldn’t read. Only one was in English. Glancing through it, he realized that at one time there must have been regular visitors to this monastery and that this room must have been some sort of historical archive for the place. Apparently the bones and other artifacts were relics the monks had discovered while gardening or digging foundations for new buildings.
    The flashlight started flickering on and off again,and he quickly left the room. He took the pamphlet with him, hoping no one would mind and figuring he could return it in the morning after he’d had a chance to read it.
    Retracing his steps through the courtyard, Alec reached the place where the path divided and he had made a wrong turn, arriving at last at his own room. He lit the lamp and checked all around the room just to make sure that he was in the right place this time and that there weren’t any skulls rolling around on the floor. The sight of those old bones in the glass cases still lingered in his mind, and he couldn’t help but feel a little uneasy about it now. He doused his face with water from the pitcher on the table. Taking a chair, he picked up the pamphlet he’d borrowed from the visitors’ room and began to read.
    As he thumbed through the pages, much of them detailing the long history of the monastery and the austere life the monks led there, he found one section that caught his eye. It was a chapter on Diomedes, the Greek demigod Xeena had told him about earlier, and the significance he had to this region. According to one legend, the pamphlet said, the demigod had chosen the forests of Mt. Atnos as a sanctuary to rebuild his kingdom after his defeat at the hands of Hercules. Alec leaned back in his chair and read more about the mysterious Diomedes:
    The true history of the tyrant Diomedes is lost in time, but there are many fanciful tales to be told of the horse master of Thrace that are little known to the world outside of Acracia. The accepted view of Diomedes is that this demigod was the caretaker of four flesh-eating mares bequeathed to him by his father, Ares, the Greek god of war. The mares lived a privileged life, sequestered in green pastures forbidden to all save the sacred mares themselves. Diomedes’s neighbors avoided his kingdom entirely. If by chance a foolish wanderer trespassed onto his fields, drank the water from his wells, or ate the fruit of his orchards, the unfortunate traveler was quickly reduced to fodder for the tyrant’s