"Andoo?" I queried.
"That is my country," she explained. "The mountains of Andoo are very beautiful."
There was a note of wistfulness in her voice; her eyes were contemplating a scene that mine could not see. Suddenly I realized how brave the girl had been, how cheerful she had remained through the hardships and menacing dangers of our flight, all despite the probably hopelessness of her situation. I touched her hand gently.
"We shall do our best to return you to the beautiful mountains of Andoo," I assured her.
Nalte shook her head. "I shall never see them again, Carson. A great company of warriors might not survive the dangers that lie between here and Andoo—a thousand kobs of fierce and hostile country."
"A thousand kobs is a long way," I agreed. "It does seem hopeless, but we'll not give up."
The Amtorians divide the circumference of a circle into a thousand parts to arrive at their hita, or degree; and the kob is one tenth of a degree of longitude at the equator (or what the Amtorians call The Small Circle), roughly about two and a half earth miles; therefore a thousand kobs would be about two thousand five hundred miles.
A little mental arithmetic convinced me that Nalte could not have drifted down the big river two thousand five hundred miles without food, and I asked her if she was sure that Andoo was that far away.
"No," she admitted, "but it seems that far. We wandered a long time before we reached the river, and then I drifted for so long that I lost track of time."
Nevertheless, if we found Duare, I was going to be faced by a problem. One girl must go down the valley in search of her own country, the other up the valley! And only one of them had even a hazy idea of where her country lay!