But Waldo turned in the other direction. He walked a little way across the hard, bare rock, which he seemed to be attentively examining, till suddenly he stopped short, and tapped on the ground with a little stick he had in his hand.
'It must be about here,' he said. The other three children came close round him.
'Here,' exclaimed Silva, and she pointed to a small white cross cut in the stone at their feet.
Waldo knelt down, and pressed the spot exactly in the centre of the cross. Immediately a large slab of rock, forming a sort of door, but fitting so closely when shut that no one would have suspected its existence, opened inwards, disclosing a flight of steps. Waldo looked round.
'This is the short cut to the face of the cliff,' he said. 'Shall I go down first?'
'Yes, and I next,' said Rollo, eagerly springing forward.
Then followed Silva and Maia. The flight of steps was a short one. In a few moments they found themselves in a rocky passage, wide enough for them to walk along comfortably, one by one, and not dark, as light came in from little shafts cut at intervals in the roof. The passage twisted and turned about a good deal, but suddenly Waldo stopped, calling out:
'Here we are! Is not this worth coming to see?'
The passage had changed into a gallery, with the rock on one side only, on the other a railing, to protect those walking along it from a possible fall; for they were right on the face of an enormous cliff, far down at the bottom of which they could distinguish the tops of their old friends the firs. And far as the eye could reach stretched away into the distance, miles and miles and miles, here rising, there again sweeping downwards, the everlasting Christmas-trees!
The passage stopped suddenly. It ended in a sort of little shelf in the rock, and higher up in the wall, at the back of this shelf as it were, the children saw two large round holes cut in the rock: they were the windows of the eagles' eyrie.