In the beginning he had taken the lead, but his slow, clumsy progress had nettled her. “Give me the compass,” she had demanded. “I’ll go ahead and show you how. It’s a pity you’re so big. ‘The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong’--Ecclesiastes something or other. They’re to the springy-boned and wiggly. Watch auntie, Inman!” Watching auntie was difficult, for auntie glided along so bonelessly and snakily that half the time she was out of sight and had to wait for him to catch up. When an occasional low-growing limb fought her demand for the right of way, she went flat and swam under it, while the man was obliged to surrender and find a way around it. Often the packs on their shoulders caught like Absalom’s hair, and then there was difficulty for both. One usually had to extricate the other. “You’re like a pig caught under a fence,” the widow told her companion. “Why don’t you squeal when I pull your leg? And, my stars, you’re heavy, man!” Despite the carpet of leaves under them, their knees became chafed. They cut pieces of leather from the uppers of their high-laced boots, made two holes on either side of them, and tied them over their knees with heavy twine. Every muscle in their bodies ached. They were obliged to rest frequently, especially the doctor, to lie flat on the earth and straighten their limbs. At rare intervals they came upon breaks in the thicket, where for maybe several hundred feet they could walk erect. In one of these breaks, where two Digger pines grew, they made camp for their first night in the chaparral. They were in the thicket another day and night and until noon of the next day. They had come upon deep cañons, where the chaparral broke and scrub oak grew. Here they found moisture, enough to replenish the water-bags, the contents of which they had been nursing carefully. But always the chaparral reached out to meet them when they had crossed one of these earth scars, and before long they were crawling again. Toward noon of the third day they found themselves crawling over level land, where the ragged growth was sparse. Both were nearly spent, when of a sudden the land began descending rapidly. And almost before they were aware of it they were gazing down spellbound into an abyss which could be nothing else than the long-sought Valley of Arcana. It was freakish. Neither had ever seen its like before. Thinking themselves in the midst of a waste of chaparral and far from their goal, the land suddenly had dropped to a shelf a thousand feet below them. Charmian said that, if she had had her eyes shut, she probably would have crawled right over the precipice and pitched to her death on the rocks below. It was a miniature Grand Cañon of the Colorado, with surrounding walls as steep and perilous. The break was as abrupt and stupefying as the far-famed Pali of the Island of Oahu.