"Right oh! Lead on!" I cried, and the old fellow began leading us farther into the gloomy bottom of the "cup", clambering round the boulders, Jaffa, myself, the three marines, and Griffiths following him. Then he began to ascend the precipitous wall itself by a path—if you could call it a path—so steep and so narrow in places that it was as much as I could do to keep my feet or climb up it. It zigzagged up that wall in twenty or more zigzags; looking down from the upper ones we could see those below; looking upwards we could see no trace of any foothold, nothing whatever but rocks rising sheer above us. At one or two of the worst places the edge of the track actually overhung, and small stones dislodged by my feet fell plumb down until I dare not watch them far for fear of feeling dizzy. Presently we had scaled the rocks sufficiently high to come to the edge of the shadow cast by the eastern rim of the "cup". Here I called a halt, perhaps three hundred feet below the gap, and we leant back against the rocks and rested. I felt like a fly on a wall, and only wished that I had suckers on my hands and feet, or were a goat. "This isn’t a proper track, is it?" I asked Jaffa. He smiled, and at the time I didn’t believe him when he said: "The only way out of the valley—only way inland from the village—for men or camels!" "Camels! What nonsense!" I thought. The old head-man was much too energetic for me. Off he went again, and led us into the full blaze of the sun. Great snakes! In a minute or two I was dripping with perspiration, and when we did at last reach that gap, and I threw myself down on some rocks there, I don’t think that I had ever felt so hot in my life. However, a grand current of air whistled through the gap, as though this, too, was the only way the sea-breezes could pour inland. I soon cooled down. "What a climb!" I said to Webster, as we looked down at the extraordinary chasm beneath our feet—the "coffee-cup", as I have called it—and tried to trace the zigzag path up which we had climbed. It must have taken us an hour at least to ascend, and I confess that, as I looked down, I did not in the least relish the idea of having to crawl down again. At the bottom it was dark and gloomy and silent; not a trace of villagers could we see among the rocks there, nor could we get a view of the _Intrepid_ or the sea beyond, because the crack in the "coffee-cup" was shut in by another shoulder of the mountains. The gap was about five yards wide, its sides about twenty feet high, and I took twelve paces before I looked down into the valleys on the far side. Deep and misty they were, and beyond them stupendous ranges of barren, naked mountains lost themselves in the distance.