, and a small stock of matches
and tobacco.

Their road for the first five or six miles led up a gentle acclivity,
just sufficient to make itself felt, but not steep enough to render
walking difficult or fatiguing. Then came a stretch of flat country,
bounded on each side by the projecting spurs of a range of rugged hills
of fantastic outline which stretched immediately across their path at a
distance of some three or four miles or so. The pedestrians had not
progressed very far across this plain before their attention became
arrested by a curious phenomenon. The atmosphere immediately behind the
range of hills last mentioned was thick with fleecy vapour, now so thin
that the distant table-land could be dimly seen through it as through a
veil, and anon so dense that it assumed a decided cloud-like shape upon
which the unsetting sun shone with dazzling brilliancy. This thickening
of the vapour seemed to occur at tolerably regular intervals of about
twenty minutes each, and was immediately preceded by a sudden silvery
gleam succeeded by a most brilliant and perfectly formed rainbow. The
periodical recurrence of this singular phenomenon under a perfectly
cloudless sky of course greatly excited the curiosity of the
pedestrians, and they pushed rapidly forward, eager to ascertain the
cause.

As they advanced, the encircling hills thrust their projecting spurs
further and further into the narrowing plain, their slopes became
steeper and more rugged, and rocks began to crop out here and there with
increasing frequency through the lessening soil. A corresponding change
of course occurred in the character of the landscape; it grew
increasingly picturesque and wild at every step, and at length the
travellers found themselves at the mouth of a narrow rocky boulder-
strewn gorge bounded on either side by titanic masses of volcanic rock,
rugged and moss-grown, with little patches of herbage here and there, or
an occasional stunted pine growing out of an almost imperceptible
fissure. The only signs of life in this wild spot consisted of a
diminutive musk-ox here and there cropping the scanty herbage half-way
up the apparently inaccessible height in spots from which it appeared
equally impossible for the creature to advance or to retreat.

Plunging into this defile, the travellers advanced with steadily
increasing difficulty, the boulders with which their path was strewed
growing ever larger and more numerous until at length