Captain Mason gave me a slow look.
“Do you think that he intends to send us away?” he asked.
“If not, he hasn’t sent other castaways off, and we’ll find them here.”
Again that slow look, but I felt that it saw too far to include me. He shook his head, and said, as though talking to himself:
“Now begins the great struggle. We’ll be patient—and ready. That girl is our hope.”
The king descended; the fan-bearer, her face mantled with content, disappeared within the administration hut and dropped the curtain. The rear guard were waiting for us three, and we started. After a few paces, I turned, and saw, as I had hoped to see, a brown face watching us through the parted curtain, and it was filled with more mysteries than any enchanted forest ever held.
On and up we went, and finally reached the summit. We stood on a small open plateau, which abruptly ended in a precipice. Before us was a giant chasm in a great tableland of lava. The floor was a thousand feet below. We were looking down on it from the top of the great wall of columnar basalt which enclosed it. The chasm was an irregular ellipse, some three miles on its minor axis and five on its major. The floor was level, and, except for some farms, was covered with a forest. A breeze sent long, unctuous waves of lighter green rolling over it, or swirling in graceful spirals where the wall deflected the wind and drifted it on in majestic eddies.
In splendid contrast to the deep, warm colors below was the gloomy black of the mighty enclosing rampart. Near the upper end a beautiful stream, nearly a river in size, made a wild, joyous leap over the brink. A lake into which the water plunged sent up clouds of mist, out of which sprang a rainbow. From the lake ran the stream of molten silver which swung lazily on its shining way through the valley till lost in the distance. The leader of the guard announced that the valley was our destination. I was dumb in the grasp of its witchery, but a quiet voice brought me back:
“As good a prison as another.” Captain Mason had spoken.
“Why, man,” I cried, “that is Paradise!”