I wasn’t going to let a girl beat me if I could help it, so I slipped off my heavy _chaplis_, fastened them on to my belt, wriggled my toes into what foothold I could find, and followed. But she had caught Payindah’s outstretched hand, and was over the corner while I was still twenty feet behind. Payindah hauled me up, and then, with “Wah! the miss-sahib must be a true hill-woman,” he followed her. It was easier going after that, a long smooth slope of perhaps two in one, twenty to twenty-five feet broad, with a sheer drop on either side. Aryenis went up it without an effort, Payindah and I panting behind her. A hundred feet farther up in front I could now see Wrexham, with Forsyth still farther ahead. Another five minutes, with the arch getting narrower and narrower, and we came to the top, whence it splayed in a gentle curve over forty feet or so of nothingness to join the main wall. Luckily we all had good heads for height, but less experienced people would have sat down rather tremblingly, I think. Picture to yourself a narrow causeway of rock only a few feet wide, perhaps twenty feet thick, sprung forty or fifty feet over a drop of nearly three hundred to the back of the hill we had left, and gently sloping downward again from the centre into a slight crevice in the towering wall in front, which rose smooth greenish-grey rock, apparently void of any decent hand- or foot-hold hundreds of feet above us. Some eighty feet above the end of the arch where we stood in the white sunlight, the wide desert spread out behind and the wind whistling past us, were the black entrances to the caves, three of them, the centre one--the biggest--perhaps twenty feet across, almost directly above the arch. Wrexham and Forsyth had been joined by Aryenis, and were talking together on the narrow end of the arch where it joined the cliff. I crossed the arch, avoiding looking down at the dizzy drop below, and joined them. Aryenis turned to me with a little smile of triumph. “Oh, Harilek, you can run over flat stones all right, but you are slow--slow--on a hill. I must teach you to go quick.” “Thank you. You shall,” I said. Then I turned to Forsyth. “How the deuce are we going to get up there?” “Up that crack in the rock,” said he, pointing to a thin seam I had not noticed at first. I looked at it. The more I looked, the less I liked it. I looked again more than doubtfully. “I shall go up first with the rope, and if I slip you’ll have to try and hang on to the end and pick up the bits.” He was taking off his coat as he spoke. We tied the rope round him, and the rest of us got hold of the end, prepared to try and pull him clear of the arch if he slipped, a pretty hopeless task. He took a last look round, and then he stepped out the couple of feet over empty space, clinging to a tiny projection in the rock, got his feet on the edge of the seam which ran slightly slanting, and started up.