Jack Slingsby and I had scarcely spoken during our steep and rapid clamber, but our thoughts were the same; anxiety--intense anxiety--for our fate; repugnance for our captors, and a natural horror of dying a barbarous death at their hands, on these remote and lonely mountains; far from help, far from justice and from civilisation; a death, of which our friends, our relations, and our comrades would never hear--would never know; for our fate would become a mystery, which all the captains general, the ambassadors, the chargés des affaires, and even the correspondents of the "Times" would be unable to clear up or unravel,--as it was the purpose of these wretches, whose prey we had become, to hide for ever our remains, and the very means of our death, as completely as if we had been flung into Mount Etna. In this sequestered part of the mountain chain, hidden among the thickly-twined laurels, the wild and straggling vines, and the densely-matted jungle of gourds, and other luxuriant creepers, there suddenly yawned a chasm in the granite rocks--a black profundity of unknown depth. The gaping rent was about twenty feet broad by some hundred in length, but its mouth was greatly diminished by the bordering foliage and wild plants that overhung it. Far down, perhaps five hundred feet below (for the bottom was unseen), there rolled with a deep, hoarse, roaring sound the Rio de Muerte--the River of Death--a subterranean tributary of the Guadalquiver; and its strange and hollow voice as it gurgled, surged, and bellowed through the clefts and fissures in the heart of the mountains, filled me with a pang of horror. Here we paused, and our captors muttered one to another under their thick beards, smoked their paper cigaritos, and leaned leisurely on their short escapetas, or long-barrelled muskets, and seemed to await the approach of Fabrique de Urquija, who was some yards behind us, and came up very much at his ease. "My God!" said my friend, "if it be their purpose to--to----" "To throw us down there, you would say? My dear Slingsby, such seems indeed to be their dreadful purpose, and I see here but little hope of mercy or of charity, where bribes greater than those of that infamous major have failed before a savage idea of honour and the fulfilment of a villanous trust." "Heaven help us!" "If these are not your prayers, señores," said one fellow in Spanish, with a slight Murcian accent, "you had better betake yourselves to them, for in less than ten minutes you will be at the bottom of this terrible place, and be swept through the bowels of the mountain towards the Guadalquiver."