said Griggs; "he went through all that to find
nothing."

The doctor was silent for a short space, before he continued.

"No," he said; "you are wrong, according to the poor old adventurer's
account, and here comes the strange part of his story. He said that he
believed he went raving mad after being forced to cover the remains of
his last companion with pieces of rock, and for a long time he could
think of nothing but getting back to civilisation; but the more he tried
the more he seemed to be led deeper and deeper into the great hot,
sandy, stony wilderness. It was as if something from which he could not
escape kept on driving him to continue the search upon which he had
started, till one day he came upon a wider and more level plain of salt
and sand, while in the distance, far down upon the horizon, he could see
a clump of mountains, towards which he made his way, toiling on day
after day, week after week, as it seemed to him, and the range seemed to
be always receding with tantalising regularity, while he was parching
with thirst and the tops were covered with snow.

"At last, though, when he had been compelled to lie down and rest every
few steps from exhaustion, and after months of toil, he reached the foot
of the mountains."

"Poor fellow!" said Griggs. "They must have been a long way off, and no
mistake. In dreamland, I'm afraid."

"And I too," said the doctor. "This part of his narrative is very
suggestive of a fever dream; but he spoke calmly, and as if he believed
every word to be true. There was a simple earnestness, too, in the way
in which he told me of how, dried-up as he was, he revelled in the
ice-cold water that trickled down from the mountain-peaks in stream
after stream which only meandered for a few hundred yards before every
drop was soaked up in the burning sand."

"That's the worst of the salt plains southward," said Griggs quietly.

"I suppose so," said the doctor, "and this sounded very simple and
truthful, but it seemed to me that here fiction was a good deal mingled
with fact. He went on to say that these were the mountains of which he
and his friends had been in search, for he was not long in discovering
now that those hills were composed of the richest gold ore, while in a
central tableland some two thousand feet up stood the remains of the
city of which he had been in search.

"This proved to be completely ruined, one mass of crumbling stone wall;
but every here and there