His lantern revealed no water in the depths and he fancied that it had something to do with ceremonials, perhaps with sacrifice.

There was a way around the well, but it was narrow and he chose to go no further.

Instead he crouched on the steps where he was safe from a fall, and put the lantern beside him.
It was an oil lamp.

Had he possessed any means of relighting it he would have blown it out, and sought sleep in the dark, but once out, out always, and he moved it into a little niche of the wall, where no sudden draught could get at it, and where its hidden light would be no beacon to any daring Mexican who might descend the stairway.
The sense of vast antiquity was still with the boy, but it did not oppress him now as it might have done at another time.

His feeling of relief, caused by his escape from the Mexicans, was so great that it created, for the time at least, a certain buoyancy of the mind.