The walls were of a grey-green limestone here, though at the entrance the general tinge had been brown. There was practically no vegetation save for here and there, just at the foot, blanched shrubs and small plants of the type common in rock country over middle Asia. Just now the sun was nearly overhead, and some stray sunbeams filtered down, but for the greater part of the day the valley must have been--indeed, we soon found out that it was--shrouded in a grey gloom. By the time we had gone another mile, the walls had closed in to barely ten feet apart. “I wouldn’t like to be caught in a spate here,” said I. “The place would be a seething torrent fifty or sixty feet deep in a few minutes if there was a heavy fall beyond. It rather makes me think of the Narrows on the Wana road from Jandola, only on a bigger scale.” “Never been up there,” said Wrexham; “but, if you birds had to fight in stuff like this last year, I’m glad I wasn’t there. One thing here is that it’s so high above that, short of heaving over rocks blindly, the other side couldn’t get at you at all if you had command of the end. If the inhabitants are unpleasing, we could manage to hold them up in this pretty easily with rifles, and if we couldn’t get in, at least they won’t be able to get out at us. What a topping entrance for a real mediæval fortress!” “Or even for a modern one. You couldn’t get guns up the cliff anywhere near here, and so you’d have to fight through this in pure primitive fashion; and if, as it must, it opens out in front, all they’ve got to do is to stick a few men with rifles, or even with bows, a little way beyond under cover to prevent you ever getting out at all.” We were just rounding a turn as we spoke, Forsyth leading. We heard him exclaim suddenly, and then, coming round the corner, saw him standing staring at the rock walls. “Well, I’m d----d!” was all he said. It took us a second to realize about what he was exclaiming. The stream split into two branches, and twenty yards farther on these two branches disappeared into tunnels in the rock, low, square tunnels, perhaps three feet high by two broad, obviously the work of man, cut foursquare out of the solid limestone. “Now I wonder what they did that for?” said Wrexham. “It doesn’t look as if these were springs. It seems rather as if somewhere higher up they had deliberately diverted the water.” We studied the little tunnels, but there was nothing to show who had made them. Unornamented, they might have been of any date. Just plain tunnelling through the rock much as you can see in Northern India to-day, where the tribesmen tunnel along in the river-banks to lead water off to fields lower down, up above the natural water-level of the stream. In front the valley continued its sinuous course, but dry now. We followed for about one hundred yards, and then Wrexham stopped and sniffed. He has a keen nose. “Something dead about these parts,” he said at last.