“Guess I’d better get busy with my fishing tackle!” exclaimed Forrester.

“Ain’t any fishing tackle,” said Jonas succinctly.  “She must ‘a’ washed out of the hole in the Ida.  I was just looking for it myself.”

“Suppose you put us on half rations,” suggested Enoch, “and one of us will try to get to the top, with the gun.”

Milton nodded.  “Judge, are you any good with a gun?”

“Yes, I’ve hunted a good deal,” replied Enoch.

“Very well, we’ll make you the camp hunter.  The rest understand the river work better than you.  Forrester, you and Agnew and Jonas, patch up the Ida; and Harden, you stay with me and let’s see what the maps say about the chances of our getting out before we reach the Ferry.  When the rest have finished the patch, you and Agnew row downstream and see if you can pick up any wreckage from the Na-che.”

Jonas made some coffee and Enoch, after resting for a half hour, took the gun and started slowly along the river’s edge.

His course was necessarily downstream for, above the heap of stones where he had tied the Ida, the river washed against a wall on which a fly could scarcely have found foothold.  There was a depression in the wall, where the camp was set.  Enoch worked out of this depression and found a foothold on the bottom-most of the deep weathered, narrow strata that here formed a fifty-foot terrace.  These terraced strata gave back for half a mile in uneven and brittle striations that were not unlike rude steps.  Above them rose a sheer orange wall, straight to the sky.  Far below a great shale bank sloped from the river’s edge up to a gigantic black butte, whose terraced front seemed to Enoch to offer some hope of his reaching the top.

He slung the gun across his back and began gingerly to clamber along the stratified terrace.  He found the rock extremely brittle and he was a long hour reaching the green shale.  He was panting and weary and his hands were bleeding when he finally flung himself down to rest at the foot of the black butte.

A near view of this massive structure was not encouraging; terraces, turrets, fortifications, castles and above Enoch’s head a deep cavern, out of which the wind rushed with a mighty blast of sound that drowned the sullen roar of the falls.  Beyond a glance in at the black void, Enoch did not attempt to investigate the cave.  He crept past the opening on a narrow shelf of rock, into a crevice up which he climbed to the top of the terrace above the cavern.  Here a stratum of dull purple projected horizontally from the black face of the butte.  With his face inward, his breast hard pressed against the rock, hands and feet feeling carefully for each shift forward, Enoch passed on this slowly around the sharp western edge of the butte.