They kept steadily on their way till dusk, and then halted for a brief space.  The party was a small one now, only some half-dozen braves and a few squaws.  Dorothy wandered with her jailer, whom she had for shortness called the Falling Star, to a little rise, and looked down upon the great desolate, purpling land in which evidently Nature had been amusing herself.  There were huge, pillar-like rocks streaked with every colour of the rainbow, from pale pink and crimson to slate-blue.  There were yawning canyons, on the scarped sides of which Nature had been fashioning all manner of grotesqueries—­gargoyles and griffins, suggestions of many-spired cathedrals, the profile of a face which was that of an angel, and of another which was so weirdly and horribly ugly—­suggesting as it did all that was evil and sinister—­that one shivered and looked away.  All these showed themselves like phantasmagoria, and startled one with a suggestion of intelligent design.  But it was not with the face of the cliff alone that Nature had trifled.

The gigantic boulders of coloured clays, strewn about all higgledy-piggledy, resolved themselves into uncouth antediluvian monsters, with faces so suggestive of something human and malign that they were more like the weird imaginings of some evil dream than inanimate things of clay.  And over all brooded the mysterious dusk and the silence—­the silence as of death that had been from the beginning, and which haunted one like a living presence.  Only perhaps now and again there was a peculiar and clearly-defined, trumpet-toned sound caused by the outstretched wing of a great hawk as it swooped down to seize its prey.  It was the very embodiment of desolation.  It might well have been some dead lunar landscape in which for aeons no living thing had stirred.

But Dorothy had other things to think of.  Her position was now seemingly more perilous than before.  It was so hard to think that they had all been so near deliverance, and, in fact, had given themselves over entirely to hope, and then had been so ruthlessly disappointed.

But there had been compensations.  Putting on one side the shedding of blood, for which nothing could compensate, there was that new interest which had sprung into glorious life within her, and had become part of her being—­her love for the man who had more than once put himself in the power of the enemy so that she and her father might be saved.  Yes, that was something very wonderful and beautiful indeed.

When the moon got up the party was reformed, and they started out again.  In the pale moonlight the freaks of Nature’s handiwork were more fantastic than ever, and here and there tall, strangely-fashioned boulders of clay took on the semblance of threatening, half-human monsters meditating an attack.