Its cables were loosened and its floorway broken, for, like all things else in the land, the Spaniards had suffered it to fall well nigh to ruin; and, as I led Joyful Star across it by the hand, I thought of what it had been in the olden times, when not a rope or a stick was suffered to be out of place, and when the Son of the Sun had been borne across it in his golden travelling litter, with long processions of his adoring people going before and behind him, strewing his way with flowers, and waking the echoes of these gloomy gorges with the melody of their songs and laughter. From here we journeyed on, ever facing the setting sun, for two days more, still winding higher and higher up into the mountains, until at length, on the third evening, I, riding alone many yards in front of the others, found the sign that I was looking for--a rock with three seats carved on the top of it--and turned my mule from the track and rode over the rough, stony ground up the side of the mountain until what looked from the road a single rock-built peak opened into two. I beckoned to the others to follow me, and when they came up I said to the professor,-- 'Do you know where you are now? Have you ever been here before?' He looked about him and shook his head, saying,-- 'This may have been the place where we got off the road when my mule gave out, but I don't recognise it. Do you mean that we are near the valley?' 'Yes,' I said. 'Do you not remember seeing yonder two peaks from the shore of the lake near where you found me?' He looked at them for a moment, and then said,-- 'Yes, I remember them; but they don't look the same, and I don't believe I could find my way back into the valley from here to save my life. It's very strange how I can have forgotten it so completely.' I smiled as he said this, knowing that I had brought them purposely many miles out of the way by which he had found the valley by accident, for I had no desire that the way should be known to any but myself and those I had chosen from among the remnant of the Children of the Blood. Then I bade them follow me again, and once more rode on alone ahead, for, as you may well believe, I was too full of my own thoughts and hopes and fears to be in any mood for conversation, even with Joyful Star herself. They, too, talked but little, and as we rode on in the deepening gloom amid the solemn silence and the gaunt grandeur of the mountains, their words became fewer and fewer, till at length thought took the place of speech, and the silence was broken by no sound save the patter of the mules' feet and the rattle of stones under their iron-shod hoofs.