o whistle a lively tune--as he
walked slowly around, examining the cliffs, and every crack and cranny,
with critical eye. The echoing notes reverberated weirdly among the
brooding rocks. Suddenly his foot struck something--something hard. He
looked down, and could not repress a start. There at his feet, grinning
up at him, lay a human skull--nay, more, a well-nigh complete skeleton.

It was a gruesome find under the circumstances. Laurence, his nerves
unstrung by the effects of the drug, and recent alternations of
exultation and what was akin to despair, felt his flesh creep. What did
it mean? Why, that no way of escape did this valley of death afford.
This former victim--had he been placed there in the same way as himself,
and, all means of exit failing, had succumbed to starvation when his
provisions were exhausted? It looked that way. Bending down, he examined
this sorry relic of humanity--examined it long and carefully. No bone
was broken, the skeleton was almost complete; where it was not, the
joints had fallen asunder without wrench, and the smooth round cranium
showed not the slightest sign of abrasion or blow.

With sinking heart he pursued his search; yet somehow his attention now
was given but languidly to potential means of exit which the faces of
the cliffs might afford. Something seemed irresistibly to draw it to the
ground. Ha! that was it. Again that horrid gleam of whitened bones.
Another skeleton lay before him--and look, another, and another, at
short distances apart. All these, like the first, were unshattered,
uninjured; but--the whole area here was strewn with skulls, yellow and
brown with age,--was strewn with bones also, mossy, mahogany-hued, and
which crackled under his tread.

No one could be more ruthless, more callous; no man could view scenes of
cruelty and bloodshed more unmoved than Laurence Stanninghame,--as we
have shown,--or bear his part more coolly and effectively in the
fiercest conflict; yet there was something in these silent human relics
lying there bloodless; in the unnatural, haunted silence of this
dreadful death-valley that caused his flesh to creep. Then he noticed
that all were lying along the slope of a ridge which ran right across
the hollow, dividing the floor of the same into two sections. He must
needs go over that ridge to complete his explorations, yet now he shrank
from it with awe and repugnance which in any other man he would have
defined as little short of terror