The two parties broke camp simultaneously, Busa and his bearers taking the back trail up the path which they had all descended an hour earlier, while the others, under Earle’s leadership, proceeded down the mountain side at their best speed, being impatient to reach the fertile, cultivated country bordering the lake below.
But the task was not by any means so easy as it had first appeared, for they had scarcely gone a mile when they unexpectedly found themselves at the verge of a long line of precipitous cliffs overlooking the great basin in which lay the lake and the city. It was by no means a pleasant situation in which they found themselves, for they were standing upon a steep slope, clad with short, dry grass, almost as slippery as ice to walk upon, and this steep slope ended abruptly in a precipice which Earle, going down upon his stomach and peering cautiously over the edge, declared could be not less than six or seven thousand feet high. So terrible was the shock it gave him to find himself overhanging and gazing down into that dizzy void, that it induced a violent attack of vertigo, causing him to scream out that he was falling, and to beg those who were holding him to pull him back. They, of course, did so at once; but several minutes elapsed before the adventurous gazer sufficiently recovered his nerve to stand, and when he did so he was bathed in a cold perspiration, while his teeth chattered to such an extent that it was some time before he could distinctly articulate.
“Never had such a fearful shock in my life,” he afterwards explained to Dick. “Of course, I knew that the valley was an enormous depth below us, but when I undertook to peer over the edge of the cliff I did not for a moment anticipate that I was going to find myself hanging over a sheer void, thousands of feet deep. I expected to find below me a precipitous cliff seamed and scarred with innumerable irregularities and projections, by means of which an ordinarily active man might easily make his way down; but, man alive, this precipice is sheer, from top to bottom like the wall of a house, without a single projection, so far as I could see, big enough for a fly to settle upon. It was awful to find myself lying there, with my heels higher than my head, gazing down into that dizzy hollow, at the bottom of which tall trees looked no higher than pins, and to feel that if I dared to move a muscle I should inevitably go sliding over, head first!”
“Ay,” assented Dick. “I think I know the kind of feeling. I experienced something very like it myself the first time I climbed to the height of the royal yard. The hull of the ship below me looked so small, and so utterly inadequate to sustain the substantial spars about me, that, quite unconsciously, I found myself moving with the utmost precaution, lest my additional weight should capsize the ship.”
“Yes,” assented Earle. “I guess that was something like what I felt, except that, in my case, I was convinced I should never be able to get back to safety. Nevertheless, here I am, safe and sound. And now the question arises: How are we going to get down into that valley? So far as I can see the cliffs are everywhere vertical, like this one; yet there must be a way down somewhere; else how did the inhabitants of the city get there?”
“Oh yes, of course there is a way down, somewhere,” agreed Dick. “We’d better camp, hadn’t we, and pursue our usual tactics, you going one way, and I the other, exploring?”
“Yes,” assented Earle. “But we won’t camp just here, thank you. I should be afraid that some of us would go sliding over that cliff edge before we knew it. We will go along yonder, to the eastward, a bit. The ground looks less steep in that direction, and probably we shall find a suitable camping place before long.”
They did, about a mile and a half to the eastward; and the camp having been pitched, Earle accompanied by Inaguy, set off in one direction, while Dick, accompanied by another Indian, named Moquit, went in the other, in search of a practicable route down to the plain and the shore of the lake, the two white men taking their rifles, as usual, and each carrying a pair of powerful binoculars slung over his shoulder.
The way taken by Dick led him back along the edge of the cliff by the route which they had traversed shortly before; and having reached the spot where Earle had taken his thrilling peep down into the abyss, the young man continued on, eventually entering a fir wood, through which he passed, bagging two brace of a species of pheasant as he went. Emerging from the wood, which was about a mile long, he found himself approaching a spot where the cliff seemed to dip somewhat, and halting for a moment to reconnoitre the prospect through his field-glasses, he became aware of the fact that work in the valley had begun for the day; for he observed smoke issuing from the chimneys of a number of detached buildings which he took to be farmhouses; while, studying the scene more intently, he was presently able to pick out the forms of numerous people apparently engaged in tilling the wide fields and at work in the orchards—as he took them to be—dotted here and there in the valley far below. Farther away, he perceived a number of small dots on the bosom of the lake, carefully watching which he at length became convinced that they were canoes, or some similar kind of craft, crossing the lake, some heading towards the city and others from it.
Some two hours later, Dick called a halt in a small pine wood, and ordered Moquit to kindle a fire and prepare a brace of the shot birds for their mid-day meal; and while this was being done the young Englishman sauntered off a little way in search of another spot from which he might advantageously effect a further reconnaissance of the valley. He found such a spot at no great distance and, unslinging his glasses, proceeded to search the valley and the face of the neighbouring cliffs from his new view point. But, look where he would, it everywhere seemed the same: vertical unscalable precipices of appalling height, and nowhere anything suggesting the existence of a road by means of which the valley might be reached.