Was he awake—asleep and dreaming—or—dead?
All these questions did Laurence Stanninghame ask himself by turn as he recovered his confused and scattered senses; and there was abundant scope for such conjecture for, in truth, the place wherein he found himself was a strange one.
A wall of rock arose on either side of him—one straight, perpendicular, the other overhanging, arching out above the first. As he lay there in the semi-gloom, his first thought was that he was in a cave; a further glance, however, convinced him that the place was a gigantic fissure or rift. But how had he come there?
With an effort, for he still felt strangely languid and confused, he sent his mind back to the events of the previous day. Stay, though—was it the previous day? Somehow it seemed much longer ago. He remembered the long hurried march into the heart of the mountains with his gruesome escort. He remembered partaking of a plentiful meal and some excellent corn-beer; this he had done with a view to keeping up his strength, which he might need to the full. Then he remembered no more. The liquor had been drugged, he decided.
But to what end? To what end, indeed, was he there? How had he been brought there? He raised himself on his elbow and looked around.
He started. A large bundle lay beside him—something rolled up in a native blanket. Speedily undoing this, he discovered several grass baskets with lids. These contained pounded corn, such as is eaten with amati, or curdled milk—and, indeed, a large calabash of the latter, tightly stoppered, was among the stores. Well, whatever was to become of him, he was not to starve, anyhow. But was he only being fattened for a worse fate?
Then a thought struck him, which set all his pulses tingling into renewed life. He, too, had been sent out of the country, and these stores were to last him for, at any rate, part of his journey. True, the prospect was anything but an exhilarating one, seeing that he was unarmed, and had but the vaguest idea which way to turn; that the Ba-gcatya country was surrounded by ferocious and hostile races. But then, everything is relative in this world, and to a man who has spent hours of a long day journeying towards a mysterious, horrible, and certain death, the discovery of release and life, even with such slender chances, was joy after the boding dread which those long hours had held for him. Yes, that was it, of course. Tyisandhlu had not been faithless to the friendship between them. While openly consenting to his sacrifice, for even the king dare not, in such a matter, run counter to the feelings of the nation, Tyisandhlu had given secret orders that he should be smuggled out of the country.
Having arrived at this conclusion, it occurred to Laurence that he might as well explore a little. He would leave his stores here for the present; for a glance served to show that the rift or fissure ended there, so taking only a handful of the pounded corn, to eat as he walked, he started at once.
But there was a something, a cold creepiness in the air perhaps, that quelled much of his new-born hope. The rift seemed to form a kind of circle, for he walked on and on, ever trending to the right, never able to see more than a short distance in front; never able to behold the sky. There was something silently, horribly eloquent in the grim sameness of those tomblike walls. Just then, to his relief, the semi-gloom widened into light. The cliffs no longer overhung each other. A narrow strip of sky became visible, and, in front, the open daylight.
But with the joy of the discovery another sight met his gaze, a sight which sent the blood tingling through his veins. Yet, at first glance, it was not a particularly moving one. On the ground, at his feet, lay two unobtrusive-looking pebbles of a bluish gray. But as the next moment he held them in his hands, Laurence knew that he held in a moment what he had gone through years of privation and ruthless bloodshed to obtain—wealth, to wit. For these two unobtrusive pebbles were, in fact, splendid diamonds!