As they ascended the ragged slopes, vegetation grew sparse, and when toward nightfall they gained the pass which Grom was making for--a deep cleft between two steep red and purple peaks--the rock beneath their feet was naked but for a low growth of flowering herbs and thorn. The pass was too high for the aloe and mesembryanthemum to flourish, and the lava-bed which floored it was yet too new to have clothed itself in any of the larger mountain-loving trees. Here they passed the night, in a shallow niche of rock with a fire before it; and the fire being visible from a long way off, no prowlers cared even to approach it. On the following day they traveled swiftly, but the pass was long. It was near sunset again when at last the rocks fell away to either side, and they saw spread out below their feet the land which they had come to explore. It was a vast, rolling plain, golden-green with rank, cane-like grasses, dotted with innumerable clumps of trees, and laced with full watercourses which lay in spacious loops of blue and silver. Here and there lay broad, irregular patches where the grass did not flourish, and these were of vivid emerald-green from some unknown growth. Along the horizon to the north sparkled a great water. And half-way down the steep, toward the right, smoked and smouldered a shallow, saucer-shaped crater from whose broken lower rim a purple-brown serpent of comparatively recent lava descended in sluggish curves across the intense green. Somewhat to the girl's apprehension, Grom seemed anxious to investigate the smoking crater, but the only practicable path down the mountain led them away from it, so he was content to leave it for another time and another, perhaps less repellent, approach. Descending presently into a region of ledges and ravines clothed with dense thickets, they found on every hand traces of the giant bears and the saber-tooth tigers whom they had driven from the caves in the Valley of Fire. Grom hurriedly whirled the smoldering torch into a flame, and from it lighted a couple of resinous brands, one for himself, and one for A-ya to carry. Thus armed, they fearlessly followed the broad trail of bears, which led them very conveniently down the steep. And bear and saber-tooth alike, at sight of the flame thus apparently seeking them out, remembered their recent scorching discomfiture, and slunk off like whipped curs. Grom's immediate object was to make his way straight to the shores of that great water, whose gleaming on the horizon had been like an invitation to his inquiring spirit. But when early in the forenoon of the fourth day they reached the lowlands, he found that his way would be anything but straight. The immense grasses, a species of cane, grew so tall, so dense and so thick in the stem, that it was impossible to force a path through them just where he would.