“We must find her, Paul.”

“Yes.”

“At once.”

But there I objected.

“On the contrary, we must delay.  Right now we are utterly helpless from our long fast.  They would handle us like babies if it came to a fight.  Try yourself; stand up.”

He rose to his hands and knees, then sank back to the ground.

“You see.  To move now would be folly.  And of course they are watching us at this minute—­every minute.  We must wait.”

His only answer was a groan of despair.

In some manner the weary hours passed by.

Harry lay silent, but not asleep; now and then he would ask me some question, but more to hear my voice than to get an answer.  We heard or saw nothing of our captors, for all our senses told us we were quite alone, but our previous experience with them had taught us better than to believe it.

I found myself almost unconsciously reflecting on the character and nature of the tribe of dwarfs.

Was it possible that they were really the descendants of the Incas driven from Huanuco by Hernando Pizarro and his horsemen nearly four hundred years before?  Even then I was satisfied of it, and I was soon to have that opinion confirmed by conclusive evidence.

Other questions presented themselves.  Why did they not speak?  What fuel could they have found in the bowels of the Andes for their vats of fire?  And how did sufficient air for ten thousand pairs of lungs find its way miles underground?  Why, in the centuries that had passed, had none of them found his way to the world outside?

Some of these questions I answered for myself, others remained unsolved for many months, until I had opportunity to avail myself of knowledge more profound than my own.  Easy enough to guess that the hidden deposits of the mountain had yielded oil which needed only a spark from a piece of flint to fire it; and any one who knows anything of the geological formation of the Andes will not wonder at their supply of air.

Nature is not yet ready for man in those wild regions.  Huge upheavals and convulsions are of continual occurrence; underground streams are known which rise in the eastern Cordillera and emerge on the side of the Pacific slope.  And air circulates through these passages as well as water.

Their silence remains inexplicable; but it was probably the result of the nature of their surroundings.  I have spoken before of the innumerable echoes and reverberations that followed every sound of the voice above a whisper.  At times it was literally deafening; and time may have made it so in reality.

The natural effect through many generations of this inconvenience or danger would be the stoppage of speech, leading possibly to a complete loss of the faculty.  I am satisfied that they were incapable of vocalization, for even the women did not talk!  But that is ahead of the story.