The valley couldn't have been more than a few thousand feet above sea level, for down here the air seemed to us, after our mountaineering, of a tropic heat. We were forced to discard our heavy clothes one by one, and these loathsome, travel-polluted rags the attendants solemnly carried for us. We must have cut a boorish and grotesque figure among these clean, graceful giants of the valley, but never a smile met us over our ridiculous appearance; if we had aroused a burning curiosity, little showed itself on the faces of these people but a grave, silent dignity amounting almost to awe. We passed on, as if in some fantastic sleep-walking. One day gone, we had been fighting for bare life in regions of terrible cold and appalling desert solitude; now we were plunged into the midst of what was plainly one of the highest civilisations this world has seen. Time and again I tapped my knee sharply with the rifle that lay beside me on the litter, to make sure it wasn't all a delirious mirage of the mountains, but the vision, if vision it was, wouldn't disperse. Poyning walked with wide-open eyes, muttering continually to himself. 'It can't be real, you know,' I heard him say. 'We shall wake in a minute--in the snow. The gods are laughing at us. They've dropped us in a dream valley, peopled with phantom Olympians!' 'How in the name of mystery do these people come to be buried here?' I said. 'Why has the world never heard of them?' Poyning pulled his wits together with an effort. 'That's as deep a riddle to me,' he replied. 'But from what I remember of those ghastly heights--supposing we _have_ left them--I should say the world hasn't had much chance to look into the matter.' I followed his gaze round the vast amphitheatre of mountains, which towered into the sky on every side of the valley. I am no geologist, and never harboured any kindness whatever for the layman who holds forth on sciences outside his ken. For that reason I offer no explanation as to how this broad, deep depression originally came to exist in the heart of the greatest upheaved region on our planet. I will be content to record soberly and barely what my own eyes saw: that the valley was completely mountain-locked, and apparently couldn't have been approached from any point with much less than the tremendous difficulty and hardship we ourselves had experienced in getting here. Then, in one breath, the pair of us raised a cry.