CHAPTER XI.
A DANGEROUS COMPANION.
They had gone but a few hundred yards up the stream when they heard the sound of a waterfall, and presently they came upon a perpendicular cliff some eighty feet high, over the edge of which the water fell unbrokenly.
“It would be a splendid place to camp at the edge of this pool,” the captain said. “We should have our bath always [pg 195]ready at hand, and even on the hottest days it would be cool in the shade of the trees.”
“It would not be a nice place to be caught by the natives,” Stephen said. “Even if we fortified ourselves, they would only have to get up above and throw rocks down at us.”
The Peruvian regarded this risk as trifling in comparison with the advantages of the situation. Stephen, however, determined to climb to the top of the cliff, and examine the position there, so leaving the others lying in indolent enjoyment by the pool, he set to work to find a way up. He had to go fully a quarter of a mile along the foot of the cliff before he could find a place where it could be ascended. Once on the crest, he followed the edge back until he came to the top of the waterfall. To his surprise he found that this flowed almost directly from a little lake of some three hundred yards in diameter. For about fifteen yards from the fall on either side the rock was bare; and although the level of the little lake was some three feet below it, Stephen had no doubt that in the case of a heavy tropical rain the water would rush down from the hills faster than the gap through which it fell below could carry it off, and that at such a time it would sweep over the rock on either side, and fall in a torrent thirty yards wide down in to the pool.
The view, as he stood on the patch of bare rock, was a striking one. The tree-tops of the forest between the cliff and the shore were almost level with his feet, some of the taller trees indeed rising considerably higher than the ground on which he stood. Beyond, a wide semicircle of sea extended, broken by several islands, some small, others of considerable size. Behind him the ground rose, in an apparently unbroken ascent, to a hill, which he judged to be some three or four miles away.
“This would be a grand place for a hut,” he said to himself. [pg 196]“Of course we could not put it on the rock, for we might be swept away by a sudden flood, and besides there would be no shade. But just inside the edge of trees we should do splendidly.”
He found, in fact, that at a distance of twenty yards from the edge of the bare rock it was but the same distance from the edge of the pool to the brow of the cliff.