As Shefford gazed, pondering on a way to descend lower, the Indian reached his side.  He had no sooner looked than he proceeded to act.  Selecting one of the sticks, which were strong pieces of cedar, well hewn and trimmed, he jammed it between the walls of the crack till it stuck fast.  Then sitting astride this one he jammed in another some three feet below.  When he got down upon that one it was necessary for Shefford to drop him a third stick.  In a comparatively short time the Indian reached the ledge below.  Then he called for the lassos.  Shefford threw them down.  His next move was an attempt to assist Fay, but she slipped out of his grasp and descended the ladder with a swiftness that made him hold his breath.  Still, when his turn came, her spirit so governed him that he went down as swiftly, and even leaped sheer the last ten feet.

Nas Ta Bega and Fay were leaning over the ledge.

“Here’s the place,” she said, excitedly.  “Let me down on the rope.”

It took two thirty-foot lassos tied together to reach the floor of the valley.  Shefford folded his vest, put it round Fay, and slipped a loop of the lasso under her arms.  Then he and Nas Ta Bega lowered her to the grass below.  Fay, throwing off the loop, bounded away like a wild creature, uttering the strangest cries he had ever heard, and she disappeared along the wall.

“I’ll go down,” said Shefford to the Indian.  “You stay here to help pull us up.”

Hand over hand Shefford descended, and when his feet touched the grass he experienced a shock of the most singular exultation.

“In Surprise Valley!” he breathed, softly.  The dream that had come to him with his friend’s story, the years of waiting, wondering, and then the long, fruitless, hopeless search in the desert uplands—­ these were in his mind as he turned along the wall where Fay had disappeared.  He faced a wide terrace, green with grass and moss and starry with strange white flowers, and dark-foliaged, spear-pointed spruce-trees.  Below the terrace sloped a bench covered with thick copse, and this merged into a forest of dwarf oaks, and beyond that was a beautiful strip of white aspens, their leaves quivering in the stillness.  The air was close, sweet, warm, fragrant, and remarkably dry.  It reminded him of the air he had smelled in dry caves under cliffs.  He reached a point from where he saw a meadow dotted with red-and-white-spotted cattle and little black burros.  There were many of them.  And he remembered with a start the agony of toil and peril Venters had endured bringing the progenitors of this stock into the valley.  What a strange, wild, beautiful story it all was!  But a story connected with this valley could not have been otherwise.

Beyond the meadow, on the other side of the valley, extended the forest, and that ended in the rising bench of thicket, which gave place to green slope and mossy terrace of sharp-tipped spruces—­and all this led the eye irresistibly up to the red wall where a vast, dark, wonderful cavern yawned, with its rust-colored streaks of stain on the wall, and the queer little houses of the cliff-dwellers, with their black, vacant, silent windows speaking so weirdly of the unknown past.