“Then none of them ever set foot in it?”
“I should rather think not.”
“Then how do they know what would happen if they did?”
“They know what has happened—at least, they say so. This is the place.”
They had been riding over a nearly level plain, sparsely grown with stunted vegetation, and shut in by hills, stony and desolate, breaking up here and there into a network of chasms. Under one of these and at the further edge of the plain was pitched their camp, and from where they now halted they could distinguish the smoke of the fires rising straight upward on the still air, could make out the glimmer of a white tent or two. Right in front of them reared a mountain side, steep and lofty, rising in terraced slopes—and, cleaving this there yawned the entrance of a gigantic rift.
“I’m not surprised they should weave all sorts of superstitions about such a place as this,” said Hilda Clive, as she gazed up, with admiration not unmixed with awe, at the sheer of the stupendous rock portals, so regular in their smooth immensity as almost to preclude the possibility of being the work of Nature unaided.
“Well, now, I’ve warned you what the penalty is,” went on the other. “Do you still want to go in?”
“Why, you are so solemn over it, Mr Raynier, that anyone would think you believed in it yourself.”
“They could hardly think that, could they, seeing that I’ve been through it already.”
“Been through it? Have you really? How long ago?”