The horses were beautiful animals, full of mettle and fire, notwithstanding the journey which they had just performed, and they were most sumptuously caparisoned, the saddles, though differently shaped from the European or American article, being made of soft leather, thickly padded, with a handsome saddle cloth beneath, under which again was a fine net made of thin silk cord, reaching from the animal’s withers to his tail, the edges of the net being fringed with small tassels.
Earle was of course an accomplished horseman, riding indeed like a cowboy, and therefore, out of a feeling of compassion for his companion, he chose what appeared to be the most mettlesome of the two proffered horses; but Dick, although a sailor, had also learned how to keep his seat upon a horse’s back, and the manner in which the pair lightly swung themselves up into the saddle, and the easy grace with which they retained their seats, despite the curvetting and prancing of their steeds, evoked a low murmur of admiration from the beholders as the latter formed up round the white men.
Then, just as Adoni and Camma were bidding their strange guests a respectful farewell, Earle noticed that his Indian followers and all his goods had disappeared.
“Say!” he exclaimed, seizing Acor by the arm and pointing to the spot where the Indians had been camped a couple of hours earlier—“where are my Indians? Surely, you haven’t turned them out, have you?”
The tone of voice in which the question was put and the gesture which accompanied it were evidently quite intelligible, for Acor instantly replied in deferential tones, at the same time pointing down the road; and, sure enough, after the cavalcade had proceeded about two miles, Inaguy and his companions were overtaken, trudging cheerfully along under the escort of a man who both Dick and Earle remembered having seen about the guard house earlier in the day.
The two friends, with their escort, reached the foot of the cliff road, after a ride of some six miles, shortly after the sun had disappeared behind the mountains at the western end of the valley. They were now in the valley itself, with mountains hemming them in on every hand; and as they gazed upward in wonder at the high, vertical cliffs all round them, they realised at last that they were inside an absolutely impregnable fortress, hewn out of the mountain range by the hand of Nature herself, and accessible only by air, or by the road which they had just traversed. After a thoroughly comprehensive survey of their surroundings, Earle explained to Dick that the only theory upon which he could account for so extraordinary a formation was, that thousands, or possibly even millions, of years ago the valley had been the crater of a gigantic volcano which, after the volcano had become extinct, had gradually filled with débris, leaving a depression in the middle, which in process of time, had become a lake. And, indeed, if the theory of a volcano upon so gigantic a scale could but be accepted, it looked very much as though Earle’s explanation might be correct; for the soil of the valley—a belt of flat land some two miles wide, extending all round the lake—was light and friable, but extraordinarily rich, as is apt to be the case with volcanic soil, while the vertical cliffs which hemmed it in all round bore a striking resemblance to the interior of certain well-known craters.
Just clear of the foot of the cliff road the party came upon an encampment, easily recognisable as that of the body of soldiers seen advancing from the city earlier in the day; and here the night was spent, the two white men being housed in a capacious tent, most luxuriously furnished and adorned, in which, shortly after their arrival, a meal of so elaborate a description, that it might almost be termed a banquet, was served to them by a staff of reverentially obsequious servants, and in which they subsequently slept the sleep of the just, on great piles of soft rugs spread upon the short grass.