When the warriors of the forests turned up the stair once more, they found Oleric kneeling in the water, supporting Polaris's head on his arm, while old Zenas and Everson bound with strips torn from their clothing the gaping wound which the sword-blade had left at the back of his head. Beside the group, Rombar, standing nearly to his neck in the wash of the river, lifted up his head and howled dolefully.
Six strong men took up the limp form of the fair-haired giant and bore it away up the river staircase.
So Polaris came at last to Ruthar.
Up the rocky shelves of Illia the Rutharians trudged and splashed, the chasm becoming ever narrower and more gloomy. With the narrowing of the rift, the water became deeper and its current stronger. Then one of the party uncoiled a long rope from his shoulder, and the party marched on in single file, each clinging to the rope like Alpine climbers.
Oleric urged haste and more haste.
Presently the water was too deep for Rombar, and the current set so strongly that the dog could not swim against it. At an order from Oleric, two Rutharian hunters seized the brute by the collar, and though one of them got a gashed hand for his pains, they bound Rombar's jaws and feet with ropes and carried him on their shoulders—a task which neither they nor Rombar found pleasant.
At a point in the ascent where further progress against the deepening stream was impossible, the party left the bed of the river and clambered to the right, where a flight of steep and narrow steps had been cut in the rock along a fissure which branched from the main gorge. Up nearly two hundred of those steps they toiled, until Zenas Wright and Everson, unused to such exertions, nearly fainted with exhaustion. At the top of the stairs they emerged into a forest of tall trees, oak and pine and chestnut, which grew almost to the edge of the cliffs.
No sooner had he stepped from the rock stairway than Oleric knelt and kissed the black earth.
"This, my friends, is Ruthar," he said as he arose and faced the two Americans.