and belt, he began to walk up the steps.  Like a mountain goat, he was agile, sure-footed, and he mounted the first bench without bending to use his hands.  The next ascent took grip of fingers as well as toes, but he climbed steadily, swiftly, to reach the projecting corner, and slipped around it.  Here he faced a notch in the cliff.  At the apex he turned abruptly into a ragged vent that split the ponderous wall clear to the top, showing a narrow streak of blue sky.

At the base this vent was dark, cool, and smelled of dry, musty dust.  It zigzagged so that he could not see ahead more than a few yards at a time.  He noticed tracks of wildcats and rabbits in the dusty floor.  At every turn he expected to come upon a huge cavern full of little square stone houses, each with a small aperture like a staring dark eye.  The passage lightened and widened, and opened at the foot of a narrow, steep, ascending chute.

Venters had a moment’s notice of the rock, which was of the same smoothness and hardness as the slope below, before his gaze went irresistibly upward to the precipitous walls of this wide ladder of granite.  These were ruined walls of yellow sandstone, and so split and splintered, so overhanging with great sections of balancing rim, so impending with tremendous crumbling crags, that Venters caught his breath sharply, and, appalled, he instinctively recoiled as if a step upward might jar the ponderous cliffs from their foundation.  Indeed, it seemed that these ruined cliffs were but awaiting a breath of wind to collapse and come tumbling down.  Venters hesitated.  It would be a foolhardy man who risked his life under the leaning, waiting avalanches of rock in that gigantic split.  Yet how many years had they leaned there without falling!  At the bottom of the incline was an immense heap of weathered sandstone all crumbling to dust, but there were no huge rocks as large as houses, such as rested so lightly and frightfully above, waiting patiently and inevitably to crash down.  Slowly split from the parent rock by the weathering process, and carved and sculptured by ages of wind and rain, they waited their moment.  Venters felt how foolish it was for him to fear these broken walls; to fear that, after they had endured for thousands of years, the moment of his passing should be the one for them to slip.  Yet he feared it.

“What a place to hide!” muttered Venters.  “I’ll climb—­I’ll see where this thing goes.  If only I can find water!”

With teeth tight shut he essayed the incline.  And as he climbed he bent his eyes downward.  This, however, after a little grew impossible; he had to look to obey his eager, curious mind.  He raised his glance and saw light between row on row of shafts and pinnacles and crags that stood out from the main wall.  Some leaned against the cliff, others against each other; many stood sheer and alone; all were crumbling, cracked, rotten.  It was a place of yellow, ragged ruin.  The passage