"Follow me!" ordered Ogier, and he led the way through fallen flakes of fire, smouldering beams, and smoking embers, to a portion of the castle that was intact. It consisted wholly of a cavern faced up with stone, and the cataract of fire had not reached it, or had not injured it. "Bring the prisoners to me," said Ogier. "Where is the Captain? Where is Le Gros Guillem?" The head of the band was not taken. "Disperse--seek him everywhere!" ordered Del' Peyra. The men ran in every possible direction. They searched every cranny. "He has escaped up the ladder to the Last Refuge!" shouted one. The Last Refuge was the chamber excavated above the projecting roof of the castle, cut in the solid rock. "He cannot," said another, "the ladder was the first thing to burn. See, it is in pieces now." "If he be there," scoffed a third, "let him there abide. He can neither get up nor down." "I do not think he is there. He is in Hell's Mouth." This Hell's Mouth was the tortuous cavern opening upon the ledge of rock occupied by the castle. "If he is there, who will follow him?" asked one. "Aye! who--when the foul fiend will hide him." "I do not believe it," said one of the men who had been confined in the "Church." He indicated with his finger. "There is a _mal-pas_ yonder; he has escaped along that." A _mal-pas_, in fact, exists in many of these rock castles. It consists of a track sometimes natural, often artificially cut in the face of the cliff, so narrow that only a man with an unusually steady head can tread it; often is the _mal-pas_ so formed that it cannot be walked along upright, but in a bent posture. Often also it is cut through abruptly and purposely to be crossed by a board which he who has fled over it can kick down and so intercept pursuit. "Bring up the men for me to judge them," said Ogier, "and you, Mathieu, give me your sharp-pointed pick." The man addressed handed the implement to his Seigneur, who seated himself on the floor of rock with his legs apart and extended. "Giraud!" said Ogier, "and you, Roland, run out a beam through one of the windows--through yonder, and one of you find rope--abundance. How many are here?" "There are twelve," was the answer. "That is well; twelve--enough rope to hang twelve men, one after another from the window." Sufficiency of rope was not to be found. "It matters not," said Ogier. "There are other ways into another world than along a rope. They shall walk the beam. Thrust it through the window and rope the end of it." "Which end?" "This one in the room, to hold it down." A large beam, fallen from the roof in the adjoining chamber, and still smoking and glowing at one end, was dragged in, and the burning end thrust out through a window. The driving it through the opening, together with the inrush of air to the heated apartments, caused the red and charred wood to burst into light; it projected some ten feet beyond the wall, fizzing, spurting forth jets of blue flame over the abyss.