l
of rock in front seemed to sink down into the earth, the horizon
widened out beyond it, and the _Ariel_ soared upwards and swept over
it nearly a thousand feet to the good.

"Ah!"

The exclamation was forced from her white lips by an impulse that
Natasha had no power to resist. All the pride of her nature was
conquered and humbled for the moment by the marvel that she had seen,
and by the something, greater and stranger than all, that she saw in
the man beside her who had worked this miracle with a single touch of
his hand. A moment later she had recovered her self-possession. She
unclasped her hands from his arm, and as the colour came back to her
cheeks she said, as he thought, more sweetly than she had ever spoken
to him before--

"My friend, you have glorious nerves where physical danger is
concerned, and now I freely forgive you for fainting in the
Council-chamber when Martinov was executed. But don't try mine again
like that if you can help it. For the moment I thought that the end
of all things had come. Oh, look! What a paradise! Truly this is a
lovely kingdom that you have brought me to!"

[Illustration: "The _Ariel_ sank down after the leap across the
ridge."

_See page 123._]

"And one that you and I will yet reign over together," replied Arnold
quietly, as he moved the lever again and allowed the _Ariel_ to sink
smoothly down the other side of the ridge over which she had taken
her tremendous leap.

When she had called it a paradise, Natasha had used almost the only
word that would fitly describe the scene that opened out before them
as the _Ariel_ sank down after her leap across the ridge. The
interior of the mountain mass took the form of an oval valley, as
nearly as they could guess about fifty miles long by perhaps thirty
wide. All round it the mountains seemed to rise unbroken by a single
gap or chasm to between three and four thousand feet above the lowest
part of the valley, and above this again the peaks rose high into the
sky, two of them to the snow-line, which in this latitude was over
15,000 feet above the sea.

Of the two peaks which reached to this altitude, one was at either
end of a line drawn through the greater length of the valley, that is
to say, from north to south. At least ten other peaks all round the
walls of the valley rose to heights varying from eight to twelve
thousand feet.

The centre of the valley was occupied by an irregularly shaped lake,
plentifully dotted