Immediately facing the road, across the wilderness, there had once been a wide valley between two hills: now it had been built in—by those same hands which had fashioned the pyramid of Ghizeh—with monstrous blocks of granite, placed tier upon tier till they formed a gigantic inverted pyramid sloping out towards the desert from the ground on which its apex rested, while its two sides were encased in the rock right and left.
Some hundred feet above us, in the wall of this mammoth inverted pyramid, there was a huge, solid slab of burnished copper, which glittered with a hundred ruddy colours in the morning sun. As far as our eyes could reach, where Nature had failed to make the chain of rocks uninterrupted, where any break in the line of hills, or any valley occurred, the great people, who had been cast forth by the stranger into the wilderness, and had found beyond it a paradise, had blocked it with gigantic slabs of granite, which barred every entrance to the new home they were so jealous to guard.
"Unless we fly, old man, we cannot get in by this gate," I remarked.
"No! and I expect that every entrance to this mysterious land is guarded in the same impenetrable way."
"We must try and get over these hills somehow. Surely there is a valley or mountain pass somewhere."
"I am absolutely convinced that there is none."
"Then what do you propose to do?"
"For the present, nothing … wait …"
"We have provisions here which, with the strictest economy, will last us six or eight days," I remarked casually.
"Exactly. And that is why we cannot afford to go wandering at random in search of imaginary entrances to the stronghold. This entrance is here, above us; we
