Ten minutes later he halted suddenly and cried warning. The foot he had advanced was suspended in emptiness where the floor should have been. Another match was struck, and they found themselves on the edge of a natural cavern of such proportions that neither to right nor left, nor up nor down, nor across, could the tiny flame expose any limits to it. But they did manage to make out a rough sort of stairway, half-natural, half-improved by man, which fell away beneath them into the pit of black. In another hour, having followed the path down the length of the floor of the cavern, they were rewarded by a feeble glimmer of daylight, which grew stronger as they advanced. Before they knew it, they had come to the source of it——being much nearer than they had judged; and Francis, tearing away vines and shrubbery, crawled out into the blaze of the afternoon sun. In a moment Leoncia and Torres were beside him, gazing down into a valley from an eyrie on a cliff. Nearly circular was the valley, a full league in diameter, and it appeared to be mountain-walled and cliff-walled for its entire circumference. “It is the Valley of Lost Souls,” Torres utterly solemnly. “I have heard of it, but never did I believe.” “So have I heard of it and never believed,” Leoncia gasped. “And what of it?” demanded Francis. “We’re not lost souls, but good flesh-and-blood persons. We should worry.” “But Francis, listen,” Leoncia said. “The tales I have heard of it, ever since I was a little girl, all agreed that no person who ever got into it ever got out again.” “Granting that that is so,” Francis could not help smiling, “then how did the tales come out? If nobody ever came out again to tell about it, how does it happen that everybody outside knows about it?” “I don’t know,” Leoncia admitted. “I only tell you what I have heard. Besides, I never believed. But this answers all the descriptions of the tales.” “Nobody ever got out,” Torres affirmed with the same solemn utterance. “Then how do you know that anybody got in?” Francis persisted. “All the lost souls live here,” was the reply. “That is why we’ve never seen them, because they never got out. I tell you, Mr. Francis Morgan, that I am no creature without reason. I have been educated. I have studied in Europe, and I have done business in your own New York. I know science and philosophy; and yet do I know that this is the valley, once in, from which no one emerges.” “Well, we’re not in yet, are we?” retorted Francis with a slight manifestation of impatience. “And we don’t have to go in, do we?” He crawled forward to the verge of the shelf of loose soil and crumbling stone in order to get a better view of the distant object his eye had just picked out. “If that isn’t a grass-thatched roof——”