It was ten of a blazing forenoon, and the sun had heated up the rocks until it was pain to walk on them and agony to sit, when they topped the last escarpment and came in sight of Khinjan's walls, across a mile-wide rock ravine--Khinjan the unregenerate, that has no other human habitation within a march because none dare build. They stood on a ridge and leaned against the wind. Beneath them a path like a rope ladder descended in zigzags to the valley that is Khinjan's dry moat; it needed courage as well as imagination to believe that the animals could be guided down it. “Is there no other way?” asked King. He knew well of one other, but one does not tell all one knows in the “Hills,” and there might have been a third way. “None from this side,” said Ismail. “And on the other side?” “There is a rather better path--that by which the sirkar's troops once came--although it has been greatly obstructed since. It is two days' march from here to reach it. Be warned a last time, sahib--little hakim--be warned and go back!” “Thou bird of ill omen!” laughed King. “Must thou croak from every rock we rest on?” “If I were a bird I would fly away back with thee!” said Ismail. “Forward, since we can not fly--forward and downward!” King answered. “She must have crossed this valley. Therefore there are things worth while beyond! Forward!” The animals, weary to death anyhow, fell rather than walked down the track. The men sat and scrambled. And the heat rose up to meet them from the waterless ravine as if its floor were Tophet's lid and the devil busy under it, stoking. It was midday when at last they stood on bottom and swayed like men in a dream fingering their bruises and scarcely able for the heat haze to see the tangled mass of stone towers and mud-and-stone walls that faced them, a mile away. Nobody challenged them yet. Khinjan itself seemed dead, crackled in the heat. “Sahib, let us mount the hill again and wait for night and a cool breeze!” urged Darya Khan. Ismail clucked into his beard and spat to wet his lips. “This glare makes my eyes ache!” he grumbled. “Wait, sahib! Wait a while!” urged the others. “Forward!” ordered King. “This must be Tophet. Know ye not that none come out of Tophet by the way they entered in? Forward! The exit is beyond!” They staggered after him, sheltering their eyes and faces from the glare with turban-ends and odds and ends of clothing. The animals swayed behind them with hung heads and drooping ears, and neither man nor beast had sense enough left to have detected an ambush. They were more than half-way across the valley, hunting for shadow where none was to be found, when a shotted salute brought them up all-standing in a cluster. Six or eight nickel-coated bullets spattered on the rocks close by, and one so narrowly missed King that he could feel its wind. Up went all their hands together, and they held them so until they ached. Nothing whatever happened. Their arms ceased aching and grew numb.