acter. Besides the sullenness that had laid hold of him since his
encounter with the man and girl, he now exhibited a restless
eagerness--his eyes were never still, his lips constantly moved, and I
could frequently hear him muttering to himself as we trudged along. He
asked me several times if I believed in the supernatural, and when I
laughingly replied 'No, I am far too practical and level-headed,' he
said 'Wait. We are now in the land of spirits. You will soon change your
opinion.'

"The country we were traversing was certainly forbidding--forbidding
enough to be the hunting ground of legions of ferocious animals. But the
supernatural! Bah! I flouted such an idea. All day we journeyed along a
lofty ridge, from which, shortly before dusk, it became necessary to
descend by a narrow and precipitous declivity, full of danger and
difficulty. At the bottom we halted three or four hours, to wait for the
moon, in a position sufficiently romantic and uncomfortable. A
north-east wind, cold and biting, came whistling over the hills, and
seemed to be sucked down into the hollow where we sat on the chilly
stones. The moment we sighted the slightly depressed orb of the moon
over the vast hill of rocks, and the Milky Way spanning the heavens with
a brilliancy seen only in the East, we pushed on again. On, along a
painfully rough and uneven track, flanked on either side by
perpendicular masses of rock that reared themselves, black and frowning,
like some huge ruined wall. On, till we eventually came to the end of
the defile. Then an extraordinary scene burst upon us.

"Whilst the irregular line of rocks continued close on our left, beyond
it--glittering in the miraculously magnifying moonlight with more
gigantic proportions than nature had afforded--was a huge pile of white
rocks, looking like the fortifications of some vast fabulous city. There
were yawning gateways flanked by bastions of great altitude; towers and
pyramids; crescents and domes; and dizzy pinnacles; and castellated
heights; all invested with the unearthly grandeur of the moon, yet
showing in their wide breaches and indescribable ruin sure proofs that
during a long course of ages they had been battered and undermined by
rain, hurricane, and lightning, and all the mighty artillery of time.
Piled on one another, and repeated over and over again, these strangely
contorted rocks stretched as far as the eye could reach, sinking,
however, as they receded, and leading the