In the perpetual twilight of their camp one got the feeling that this forest rolled on forever, but Ralph had not gone above three hundred yards before he unexpectedly came to one of its boundaries. To the left of the trail it ended at the base of a mighty precipice of naked gray rock. Standing at the edge of the trees and looking right and left the height of rock extended as far as he could see. Looking up, it was too beetling for him to see its summit.
Continuing upon the trail a little way farther, he came to the edge of a gulch, where he could obtain a wider prospect. Looking up now, he had dizzying, foreshortened glimpses of peaks and domes of rock, with a distant view over all of the supreme summit, shaped like a gigantic thumb of rock sticking up out of fields of snow, gilded and dazzling in the sunshine, and incredibly far-flung. It was a stirring experience thus to be brought without warning into the immediate presence of such a God. Ralph gazed, forgetting his private despite against Fortune.
At his feet the gulch came down from the left along the base of the unscalable heights. A trickle of water ran musically in the bottom of it, and was borne off to the right to join the larger stream, beside which they had ascended from the river. The trail crossed the gulch, and disappeared within the forest on the other side. The forest skirted the edge of the gulch, and swept on up concealing all on that side.
Ralph's only view was therefore up the gulch. The floor of it was heaped with broken masses of rock and fallen trees. As he looked, thinking of nothing but the wild beauty of the scene, suddenly his jaw dropped, and he dashed a hand across his eyes to make sure they were not tricking him. For out of a little tangle of living and dead trees at the base of the cliff, about a furlong from him, issued the figure of a man. It was Charley. One would have said that he had issued out of the cliff itself.
VII
BOWL OF THE MOUNTAINS
Ralph instinctively fell back among the trees. He had not been seen. Charley was unconcernedly picking his way down over the stones. Drawing back from the trail, Ralph concealed himself until he heard Charley pass on his way to camp. He then clambered down into the gulch, and made his way as fast as he could over the obstructions to the spot where the boy had so surprisingly come into view. Ralph suspected that an alarm would be raised for him as soon as Charley got back to camp.
The place he was making for was in a slight angle of the gulch, and the driftwood was piled in a wild tangle there. Climbing over the fallen trees as he had seen Charley climb down, Ralph came to a little niche of earth that provided a precarious living to three stunted pines and a few berry-bushes, the whole making a natural screen against the cliff. Pushing through it, he found himself looking into a hole in the rock at his feet.
Starting back, he gaped at it a little stupidly. He did not know what he had expected to find—not a hole in the rock! For a moment he doubted the evidence of his senses; it seemed too preposterous. Weird ideas took half shape in his brain and floated away while he stared in the hole. Was it possible they were of another race—creatures existing in the bowels of the earth without sunlight or the stir of air? Why, after travelling hundreds of miles from the world of men, was there need of burying one's self any deeper? Was it the possession of some ghastly secret that made Nahnya's face always wistful? What did it conceal, that hole, a hideous crime, disgrace unimagined—or a treasure?
The opening was about two feet across. Buttressed by the fallen trees below, and screened by the living ones, it was shrewdly hidden. Ralph wondered by what chance it had first been discovered. He lighted a match and dropped it in. It burned until it struck the bottom. It was about fifteen feet deep. There was the trunk of a young pine standing upright within it, reaching to within a foot of the top. Obviously this was used to climb in and out by.