“What! there, father? It would sweep me away.”
“Yes, if you were a thousand times as strong, my lad. The force is tremendous. Come along here.”
He led the way upwards to where there was a fall of some few feet, and at the side a shallow pool of the water, wonderfully round, and forming a basin, giving them ample room for their ablutions; after which, fresh and glowing, they climbed up past the mules to where the breakfast was waiting, the hot coffee, bread, and frizzled charqui, or dried beef, being partaken of with an appetite Perry had never felt before.
Then the remains were packed up, the squealing mules loaded, and they started once more; now rising a thousand feet, now descending, but always following the stream deeper and deeper into the mountains, till the grandeur and weird sternness of the gorge’s defiles through which they passed grew monotonous, so that at the end of two days Perry began to long for some change and the open sunshine, away from the tremendous precipices which closed them in, and, in spite of the elasticity of the air, had sometimes a strangely depressing effect.
John Manning felt it, evidently, and sought every opportunity of keeping Perry by his side, so as to have a good grumble about the colonel.
“I don’t know what he could be thinking about, Master Perry, to come to such a place as this. It’s the world’s end, I say. We shan’t have a bit o’ shoe to our foot when we’ve gone a bit farther.”
“Why don’t you ride more, then?” said Perry. “You’ve got a mule on purpose.”
“What!” said John Manning, turning sharply round, “ride that mule? No, thankye, sir. I’ve seen him kick. I’m not going to give him a chance to send me over his head down into one of them cracks. I believe some of them go right through the world. Look at this one now. I can’t see no bottom to it—can you?”
He pointed down into the deep chasm along one of whose sides the rough path led.
“No, not from here,” said Perry, glancing down, and wondering at the absence of giddiness.