One Eye moved along the side of the cliff for about five hundred yards,
then turned into a small canon hardly thirty feet wide, the bottom of
which was about twenty yards above the valley from which we had climbed.
Our intuition told us that we were near the retreat, and we halted the
hurrying guide, and in the shelter of a boulder explained to him with
more signs and gestures that we wished to proceed with extreme caution.
The end of the gulch that was not more than a stone's throw from the
face of the cliff was already dark with the shadows of the hills, and as
we suspected that the opening to Leith's refuge was close, we wished to
make no unnecessary noise in approaching it. Using the scattered rocks
as covering, we advanced slowly, but before we reached the end the sun
had disappeared, and the absence of twilight, noticeable in that
latitude, compelled us to crawl along in a darkness that made it
impossible to discern any object that was more than three feet distant.
Holman was on one side of One Eye while Maru guarded him on the other
side, and as the bottom of the gorge made it impossible for more than
three to move abreast, Kaipi and I crawled in the rear.
Pages:
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256