“It’s not exactly a suburban villa where you can walk straight up and ring the bell. The people who live here are presumably not accustomed to strangers, and they might be nasty. One is not at one’s best standing outside a fort gate trying to induce the people inside--who may not even know any language we speak--to let us in. My idea is that, if this _is_ the valley, and if we come across that stone gate, we should hang about a bit under cover and see if anything materializes.” “I was thinking of that, too,” put in Forsyth. “We’ve plenty of water now, and so there’s no immediate hurry, though the camels could do with some grazing. I’m all for trying to get to know the inhabitants somewhere out in the open. From the diary the place sounded what you might call average inhospitable, and I should prefer to try my Greek on some bloke out in the open rather than have to shout it at a narrow loophole with the tip of a three-foot arrow wavering about just inside.” “We all seem wonderfully unanimous in our thoughts,” said I; “the same thing occurred to me as we were starting. I suggest, further, we don’t even show ourselves at first. Let’s see if they materialize before we sound a tucket, or whatever the mediæval wanderer used to do when he struck a strange fortress and observed the occupants getting handy with the boiling lead in case they didn’t like his face.” So we decided--and, as it turned out, it was well that we did so--to reconnoitre as carefully as if the inhabitants were Huns and we a bashful trench crawling party, and, if we found the gateway, not to go out of cover until we saw some chance of meeting the owners on more even terms. As we went on, Forsyth remarked on the fact that the valley was getting still narrower. We had gone about a mile, and it was now not much above fifteen or sixteen feet wide. The bottom was of rounded stones and pebbles, obviously water-worn, but whether the whole valley was due to water action it was hard to say. It must have taken æons and æons for the stream to cut down those many hundred feet, unless at some time it contained a far greater flow of water than existed now. Wrexham opined that originally it must have been a fault in the rock, and pointed out that the strata here were tilted up vertically on edge. He said that probably the valley we walked in had once been a layer of very soft rock--easily decomposed--between two harder ones, and that when the rocks had been tilted up the gradual percolation of water had started a groove, and then the stream had done the rest.