y when Alan caught
her by her hands and lowered her over the face of a ledge to a
table-like escarpment below. He laughed at her fear when he dropped down
beside her, and held her close as they crept back under the shelving
face of the cliff to a hidden path that led downward, with a yawning
chasm at their side. The trail widened as they descended, and at the
last they reached the bottom, with the gloom and shelter of a
million-year-old crevasse hovering over them. Grim and monstrous rocks,
black and slippery with age, lay about them, and among these they picked
their way, while the trickle and drip of water and the flesh-like
clamminess of the air sent a strange shiver of awe through Mary
Standish. There was no life here--only an age-old whisper that seemed a
part of death; and when voices came from above, where Graham's men were
gathering, they were ghostly and far away.

But here, too, was refuge and safety. Mary could feel it as they picked
their way through the chill and gloom that lay in the silent passages
between the Gargantuan rocks. When her hands touched their naked sides
an uncontrollable impulse made her shrink closer to Alan, even though
she sensed the protection of their presence. They were like colossi,
carved by hands long dead, and now guarded by spirits whose voices
guttered low and secretly in the mysterious drip and trickle of unseen
water. This was the haunted place. In this chasm death and vengeance had
glutted themselves long before she was born; and when a rock crashed
behind them, accidentally sent down by one of the men above, a cry broke
from her lips. She was frightened, and in a way she had never known
before. It was not death she feared here, nor the horror from which she
had escaped above, but something unknown and indescribable, for which
she would never be able to give a reason. She clung to Alan, and when at
last the narrow fissure widened over their heads, and light came down
and softened their way, he saw that her face was deathly white.

"We are almost there," he comforted. "And--some day--you will love this
gloomy kloof as I love it, and we will travel it together all the way to
the mountains."

A few minutes later they came to an avalanche of broken sandstone that
was heaped half-way up the face of the precipitous wall, and up this
climbed until they came to a level shelf of rock, and back of this was a
great depression in the rock, forty feet deep and half as wide, with a
floo