It proved to be as Yussuf had anticipated, for, just as the sun was sinking below the mountains, the shelf of a path was continued along by the brink of a terrible precipice which looked black beneath their feet, and after many devious windings, it ended as it were before a huge pile of limestone, at the foot of which rocks were piled-up as if they had suddenly been dashed down from some tremendous tremor of the mountains.
“Where are we going?” said the professor.
“Up to the top of that great pile,” said Yussuf.
“But are the ruins there?”
“Yes, effendi.”
“And how are we to set there?”
“You will see, excellency. It is quite right. This is the robbers’ home, where they could set an army at defiance.”
“But we can’t get up there,” said Lawrence, gazing at the dizzy height.
As he spoke, the foremost horseman seemed to disappear, but only to come into sight again, and then it became evident that there was a zigzag and winding path right up to the top of the huge mass of rock which towered up almost perpendicularly in places, and, ten minutes later, Lawrence was riding up a path with so awful a precipice on his right that he closed his eyes.
But the next minute the fascination to gaze down was too strong to be resisted, and he found himself looking round and about him, almost stunned by the aspect of the place. But the sure-footed Turkish ponies went steadily on higher and higher round curves and sharply turning angles and elbows, till at last at a dizzy height the foremost horseman rode in between two masses of rock surmounted by ruined buildings. Then on across a hideous gap of several hundred feet deep, a mere split in the rock bridged with the trunks of pine-trees, but awful to contemplate, and making the travellers hold their breath till they were across, and amid the gigantic ruins of an ancient stronghold.