One Eye taxed our climbing powers in the next ten minutes.  With the agility of a chamois he scurried along the narrow ledges, and several times Maru was forced to check his speed so that we could keep pace with him.  Holman’s face showed the joy he felt at receiving another opportunity to retrieve the blunders we had made in our two previous attacks.  Now we had reduced the big villain’s fighting bodyguard to two persons, Soma and the dancer, and if he had not impressed the carriers, we outnumbered him.  But Leith was on his own ground, and we had already discovered that the Isle of Tears made an ideal retreat for an outlaw.  The nearly impassable jungle, surrounded by the cliffs that were tunnelled with tremendous caverns, made a hiding place in which a few men could defy an army.

One Eye moved along the side of the cliff for about five hundred yards, then turned into a small canon hardly thirty feet wide, the bottom of which was about twenty yards above the valley from which we had climbed.

Our intuition told us that we were near the retreat, and we halted the hurrying guide, and in the shelter of a boulder explained to him with more signs and gestures that we wished to proceed with extreme caution.  The end of the gulch that was not more than a stone’s throw from the face of the cliff was already dark with the shadows of the hills, and as we suspected that the opening to Leith’s refuge was close, we wished to make no unnecessary noise in approaching it.  Using the scattered rocks as covering, we advanced slowly, but before we reached the end the sun had disappeared, and the absence of twilight, noticeable in that latitude, compelled us to crawl along in a darkness that made it impossible to discern any object that was more than three feet distant.  Holman was on one side of One Eye while Maru guarded him on the other side, and as the bottom of the gorge made it impossible for more than three to move abreast, Kaipi and I crawled in the rear.

We were at One Eye’s mercy at that moment, but the idiot appeared to be much impressed by the manner in which we had pictured the sure and sudden fate that would fall upon him if we suspected him of treachery.  The mystery of the place gripped us as we went forward.  High above us the stars looked as if they were floating sequins in a sea of dark blue.

But the stars were blotted out suddenly, and I drew Holman’s attention to the fact.  The youngster got to his feet and groped around in the gloom, while we halted till he made an investigation.  It was impossible to see the face of the half-witted guide to gain any information from his gestures.

Holman stooped and whispered his finding to us.  “We’re in a covered passageway,” he murmured.  “I can just touch the roof by standing on tiptoe.  As we’re in the place we might as well walk instead of crawling; we’ll get to the end quicker.”

Maru dragged One Eye to his feet, and we pushed on.  The air of the place was much sweeter than the atmosphere of the Cavern of Skulls.  The floor, instead of being covered with thick dust as we had found it in the former place, was one of clean, smooth rock, and the walls were perfectly dry.