“It’s the most wonderful thing I ever saw in my life.” He could hardly speak from excitement. “There is another world beyond that wall of stone, and it belongs to the past--thousands of years ago, I mean. You won’t believe it; you can’t until you see for yourself.” “What is it?” Ted asked, also breathless with excitement. “You wait here now and let me sneak up and see.” “I will crawl back and put up the gun in the passage. Then you come with yours. I can’t believe my eyes, and I want you to see it and then tell me if I am right, or am I losing my mind.” To Ted, waiting in the distance, it seemed ages while Stanley carried out his plan, although in reality it was only a few minutes. The eagerly awaited wave of the hand came at last, so, picking up his gun, he hastened to the side of his companion. Together they quietly made their way through the rent in the mountainside; the walls, jagged and torn, rose to a great height on each side of them, and the bottom was strewn with a mass of shattered rock. When they reached the far end of the passage they stopped and stared in awe and amazement at the panorama spread before their eyes. They were standing on the brink of a crater miles across in each direction. The floor of the great depression was only slightly lower than the spot on which they stood. Plots of green grass, fields of huge, black boulders, interspersed with islands of tall trees, met their gaze whichever way they turned. Whisps and jets of steam and smoke rose from crevices in the rockfields, showing that the volcano was not yet extinct, but obviously it had been many, many centuries since there had been an eruption of any importance. In the centre lay a lake of large size--it covered at least a square mile. And enclosing the arena on all sides rose the stupendous walls of stone and lava, blackened with smoke and sulphurous fumes, and of such abruptness that they appeared perfectly vertical. “Good heavens!” Ted gasped. “It looks like the Inferno and Paradise combined.” “It is so terrific and so unbelievable that I am stunned. Prehistoric is the word for it--a leaf torn from the pages of the world’s history of thousands of years ago; perhaps even a million. Look, look!” Stanley was pointing to a number of black objects of rounded form that dotted one of the velvety, green areas. “Wonder how those stones came to be of such uniform size, and why they are standing in such evenly distributed groups. Some one must have placed them there. Why, one of them is moving!” “They are not stones. They are tortoises. See that one? It is the size of a wash-tub, and it’s eating grass.” “And look over there, on the margin of the water--to the right,” Ted whispered. A herd of deer was timidly approaching its favorite drinking-place, out in the open where the nervous animals had a clear view of their surroundings for many yards. “But the tigers! I don’t see a sign of them anywhere except these tracks leading away from here.”