This they had frequently been, since accident had thus thrown them together, and in that brief period of time Raynier had fallen to wondering more and more what there was about Hilda Clive that already he had begun to think how he would miss her later on, and how on earth they could have been shut up together on board a ship all the time they had, and yet that he should hardly have taken any notice of her. Now in their daily intercourse she was so companionable and tactful--and withal feminine. She was really attractive too, he thought, not for the first time, as he looked at her and noticed how well she sat her horse. As an actual fact she really had improved in the point of appearance, and that vastly; for the healthy outdoor life in that high climate had added a colour to her face which gave it just that amount of softness in which it had seemed lacking before. "If you are absolutely sure you are free from superstition," went on Raynier, "I'd like to show you something that's worth seeing." "What is it?" "There's a real thrill of curiosity in that question," he laughed. "It's a _tangi_--and a haunted one." "Oh, I must see it. Where is it, Mr Raynier?" "Close here. But before you venture you had better think over the penalty. The belief is that whoever enters it meets his death in some shape or form before the end of the next moon." "That's creepy, at any rate. But is the idea borne out by fact?" "They say it is, without exception. You would not get any of the people here to set foot in it on any consideration whatever." "Then none of them ever set foot in it?" "I should rather think not." "Then how do they know what would happen if they did?" "They know what _has_ happened--at least, they say so. This is the place." They had been riding over a nearly level plain, sparsely grown with stunted vegetation, and shut in by hills, stony and desolate, breaking up here and there into a network of chasms. Under one of these and at the further edge of the plain was pitched their camp, and from where they now halted they could distinguish the smoke of the fires rising straight upward on the still air, could make out the glimmer of a white tent or two. Right in front of them reared a mountain side, steep and lofty, rising in terraced slopes--and, cleaving this there yawned the entrance of a gigantic rift. "I'm not surprised they should weave all sorts of superstitions about such a place as this," said Hilda Clive, as she gazed up, with admiration not unmixed with awe, at the sheer of the stupendous rock portals, so regular in their smooth immensity as almost to preclude the possibility of being the work of Nature unaided. "Well, now, I've warned you what the penalty is," went on the other. "Do you still want to go in?" "Why, you are so solemn over it, Mr Raynier, that anyone would think you believed in it yourself." "They could hardly think that, could they, seeing that I've been through it already."