The first object that caught his eye, wedged in between two rocks near the foot of the precipice, was the body of a large brown bear. It was almost with a gasp of relief that Bob realized that the object of his chase was not a human being. In a flash he remembered the bear which he had seen squatting at the side of the gully when he passed the entrance a few days before. "What an ass I was not to remember it!" he thought. Then he blamed himself for allowing the ladies to take up their quarters in the cleft; before he had thoroughly explored it. The bear had evidently used it for his winter’s sleeping-place, and had been alarmed at the disturbance of his domain. He now lay stone dead, having fallen sheer for about sixty feet and then rebounded from a slope on to the rocks beneath. Looking up, Bob saw that the weather-carved cliff stretched for at least three hundred feet above him. On his left he observed that the hill-face bent round; beyond its outline he saw an extent of undulating country bounded by snow-capped hills. He wondered what was round the corner; the mouth of the gully must of course be in that direction, and not far away. He remembered that the general trend of the cavern had been towards the left; it must form one side of an irregular triangle, of which the gully and the hill-face were the other sides. What bearing would this discovery have on the situation in which he and his strange allies found themselves? He had barely asked himself the question when he saw a Cossack in the distance, riding at speed as if directly towards him. Coming from the west, he had probably brought news or orders to the leader of the Russian besiegers. Bob watched the rider draw nearer and nearer, and then pass from his sight to the left behind the jagged rock. Then he turned and retraced his steps through the cavern, thinking deeply as he went. Nothing happened to break the monotony of that weary day. The Chunchuses, pent up in their narrow quarters, became restless and irritable, and Bob feared lest they should quarrel among themselves. They resented the short rations on which they were kept, and looked hungrily on the one remaining mule, which, poor beast, seemed so wretched in its mute famished condition that Bob ordered it to be shot. More than once, as he pondered over things, he wondered whether it might be possible for the garrison to slip away through the passage he had discovered, but always he had to reject the idea as impracticable. Even if they succeeded in descending the precipitous cliff in safety, they could not hope to get clear away; for the Russians would soon discover their absence from the gully, they would be pursued, and the enemy, being mounted, must infallibly run them down. Nothing was to be gained by such a hazardous attempt; there seemed no alternative but to wait on.