pringing higher to another point
of vantage.

The place they were now in was a very steep, chimney-like rock gully,
such as would be known in Alpine parlance as a `couloir.' To those of
weak nerve or dizzily inclined heads it would have looked formidable
enough, for, besides its own height, from a little way up it seemed as
if it overhung the whole depth of the valley. Above, too, craggy
jutting rocks, shooting forth savagely against the sky, looked as though
about to fall on and overwhelm the invaders of their mountain solitude.
In hard fact it was safe enough, being indeed a gigantic natural
stairway thickly coated with oozy moss, while the sides were festooned
with masses of beautiful maidenhair fern.

"Here we are at last," cried Edala as they gained the summit. "Confess.
Doesn't this repay any amount of trouble?"

"I should think it did," answered Elvesdon, "or would, rather; for
getting here has been no trouble at all."

It was as though they were poised in mid-air. Beneath, the homestead
lay, like a group of tiny toy buildings. Around, everywhere billowing
masses of mountain, dark recesses of forest grown kloofs, gleaming
cliffs now catching the westering sun's parting kiss; the roll of the
mimosa strewn plains seeming absolutely flat from this altitude. Here
and there too the circle of a native kraal surmounted by its inevitable
thread of blue smoke, and far-away in the distance the dim peaks of the
Drakensberg range.

"Come and look over the Sipazi krantz," said Edala, at length, when the
awed silence with which this stupendous panorama could not fail to
strike a newcomer, had been broken.

"Look over it!" echoed Elvesdon. "Why it seems to me that the ground
slopes down to its brink at a pretty steep angle. You can't lie flat
there. You'd tilt over head first."

"You'll see," was the answer. And the speaker proceeded to climb down,
face to the mountain, a very steep grass slope indeed, so steep as to be
almost a precipice. Tough roots, however, grew here, strong enough to
afford a securer hold than might have been expected; then where the
slope ended she stopped. A stunted tree grew here on the very edge of
the abyss, and horizontally over the same, shooting first slightly
downwards and then up, the bend of its trunk forming a seat. And into
this seat did the girl by a deft movement, and without the slightest
hesitation, quickly glide.

"This is how you look over the Sipazi krantz," she l