“My uncle,” she said, “you tell us that you cannot come on, and it is certain that we cannot spare the time and men to send you back.  Therefore, it seems that you must stop where you are until we return, and if we should not return, make the best of your own way up the shaft.  Farewell, my uncle, this place is safe and comfortable, and if you are wise you will rest awhile.”

“Heartless woman!” gobbled Joshua, who was shaking like a jelly with fear and rage.  “Would you leave your affianced lord and lover alone in this haunted hole while you scramble down rocks like a wild cat with strangers?  If I must stay, do you stay with me?”

“Certainly not,” replied Maqueda with decision.  “Shall it be said that the Child of Kings is afraid to go where her guests can travel?”

Well, the end of it was that Joshua came on in the centre of the third body of Mountaineers, who were practically obliged to carry him.

Shadrach was right, since for some reason or other the stairs thenceforward remained more perfect.  Only they seemed almost endless, and before we reached our goal I calculated that we must have descended quite twelve hundred feet into the bowels of the rock.  At length, when I was almost tired out and Maqueda was so breathless that she was obliged to lean on Oliver, dragging me behind her like a dog on a string, of a sudden we saw a glimmer of daylight that crept into the tunnel through a small hole.  By the mouth of yet another pit or shaft, we found Shadrach and the others waiting for us.  Saluting, he said that we must unrope, leave our lamps behind, and follow him.  Oliver asked him whither this last shaft led.

“To a still lower level, lord,” he answered, “but one which you will scarcely care to explore, since it ends in the great pit where the Fung keep their sacred lions.”

“Indeed,” said Oliver, much interested for reasons of his own, and he glanced at Quick, who nodded his head and whistled.

Then we all followed Shadrach to find ourselves presently upon a plateau about the size of a racquet court which, either by nature or by the hand of man, had been recessed into the face of that gigantic cliff.  Going to the edge of this plateau, whereon grew many tree-ferns and some thick green bushes that would have made us invisible from below even had there been any one to see us, we saw that the sheer precipice ran down beneath for several hundred feet.  Of these yawning depths, however, we did not at the moment make out much, partly because they were plunged in shadow and partly for another reason.

Rising out of the gulf below was what we took at first to be a rounded hill of black rock, oblong in shape, from which projected a gigantic shaft of stone ending in a kind of fretted bush that alone was of the size of a cottage.  The point of this bush-like rock was exactly opposite the little plateau on to which we had emerged and distant from it not more than thirty, or at most, forty feet.