Preparations were soon made, the captain electing to stay below and make all ready for the party’s return.
Brace led off along the rugged terrace, which was terribly encumbered by stones fallen from above; but the young adventurer’s first idea was to continue along to where the palace-like front reared itself up about the middle of the cliff.
Briscoe stepped alongside of him, and Brace noticed how busily his companion’s eyes wandered about, taking in everything on their way. Not that there was much to see at first, save that the captain was right about the inhabitants, for everywhere among the stones which lay heating in the morning sun they came upon coiled-up serpents, many of which were undoubtedly venomous; but there were other reptiles as well, for lizards darted about by the hundred, when disturbed, to make for their holes in crevices and cracks of the stonework, their scales glistening as if made of burnished metal, bronze, deadened silver, mingled with velvety black and soft silvery grey.
At the end of a couple of hundred yards Brace stopped.
“This won’t do,” he said. “We are on the lowest terrace, and the palace is a floor higher. It ought to be somewhere over where we are.”
“That’s where I reckon it is,” said Briscoe, going to the low ruined wall between them and the river, and straining outward to look up.
“See anything?” said Brace.
“No; I can’t reach out far enough; the next terrace overhangs. But it must be here.”
“Let’s get right on towards the end,” said Sir Humphrey, “and I daresay we shall find some kind of steps leading to the next floor.”
It was some time before anything but a dark hole was found, and that seemed to be only a receptacle for loose stones, so it was passed; but after pushing on for another two hundred yards, with nothing to take their attention but the retreating reptiles and the beautiful flashing river which washed the foot of the clift, Briscoe grew uneasy.