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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 sed 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 coe cavern full of little square stone houses, each with a shtened 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 saaze 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 ris, that Venters caught his breath sharply, and, appalled, he instinctively recoiled as if a step upward ht jar the ponderous cliffs from their foundation Indeed, it see a breath of wind to collapse and co down Venters hesitated It would be a foolhardyavalanches of rock in that gigantic split Yet how ! At the bottom of the incline was an i 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 fro 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, theshould be the one for them to slip Yet he feared it

"What a place to hide!" oes If only I can find water!"

With teeth tight shut he essayed the incline And as he climbed he bent his eyes doard This, however, after a little grew ier, curious ht between row on row of shafts and pinnacles and crags that stood out froainst each other; , cracked, rotten It was a place of yellow, ragged ruin The passage narrowed as he went up; it became a slant, hard for him to stick on; it was smooth as marble Finally he surmounted it, surprised to find the walls still several hundred feet high, and a narrow gorge leading down on the other side This was a divide between two inclines, about twenty yards wide At one side stood an enorlance, because it rested on a pedestal It attracted closer attention It was like a colossal pear of stone standing on its stem Around the bottouishable to the eye They were marks of stone hatchets The cliff-dwellers had chipped and chipped away at this boulder fill it rested its tremendous bulk upon a mere pin-point of its surface Venters pondered Why had the little stone- boulder? It bore no seodhead or a sphinx Instinctively he put his hands on it and pushed; then his shoulder and heaved The stone seerate, and then tofor a long instant, slowly returned, rocked slightly, groaned, and settled back to its former position