“How could they, without a fight? One can’t believe that Stoyan and all his men were wiped out without a shot or a cry. No, I’m afraid it is that Stoyan has handed us over to some other band.”
“And where are they taking us?” asked Eirene harshly.
Maurice hesitated, then decided that it was no use to attempt concealment. “As far as I can tell, we ought to have gone south-east to get to Therma,” he said, “but we seemed to be going south-west, in the direction of the Morean frontier.”
“And no one will know! Perhaps we shall never be rescued,” said Zoe, with quivering lips.
“And it is all my fault!” cried Eirene. “I have brought you into this trouble, and I can do nothing.”
“Oh, don’t!” said Zoe hastily, forcing back her own tears when she saw Eirene’s. “We have been in worse troubles than this, and have got through. It’s—it’s just that everything seemed to be all right, and now we have to begin it all over again. And we’re tired, too. We shall look at these things more cheerfully in the morning.”
If the girls cried themselves to sleep that night, Maurice was not to know it, and in the morning they were almost ostentatiously cheerful, though the line of march still led away from Therma and towards the unknown. The character of the mountains was changing. The familiar sloping hillsides and tapering peaks were giving place to perpendicular or even overhanging cliffs, and stupendous pillars of rock towering in isolated masses.
“It’s like being at the bottom of a cañon,” said Zoe, late in the afternoon, looking up at the walls of rock. “How curiously it widens in front, Maurice! And there is another of those rock columns. Why, there is a little house at the very top! How do they get up? No, it is a big one—a castle.”
“It must be a rock monastery,” said Maurice, “though I didn’t know there were any in Emathia.”
They gazed up into the sky, where the monastery of Hadgi-Antoniou stood on its pillar like a bud at the end of a long stalk.