_Aug. 17._—Having executed the needful repairs, we continued our descent before sunrise, and finally found ourselves at the bottom of the gorge—the opposite steep of Mazulia frowning over us as precipitously as that which we had descended, and the whole ravine being so narrow that there was room for nothing but the Jasenica torrent below, over arched by the stupendous beeches which clung to both steeps. In a dry part of its bed we demolished our last scrap of bread, and reviewed our position, which was not favourable. The gorge in which we found ourselves was from all points so inaccessible that we doubted whether it had ever been trodden by foot of man before. To make our way along the valley seemed well nigh impossible, so vast were the rock and timber barricades with which the torrent had piled its course. On the other hand, to reascend either steep was tantamount to a defeat, and in either case would bring us no forwarder. But it was becoming painfully evident that we must get somewhere, and quickly—as the day before, owing to our ill-judged liberality to our Zaptieh, we had had to stint ourselves of food, and now the last scrap of solid nutriment was gone—there could be no doubt about that! So, all things considered, there was nothing for it but to fight our way down the gorge as best we might, and trust that as the stream got lower its valley would widen. We found that the best way was to plunge bodily through the water, now and then jumping from rock to rock, or slipping into deep pools, and every few yards having to scale dams of trunks and branches, whose hugeness showed the force of the torrent in the rainy season. The want of an axe made a good deal of this work more difficult than it otherwise would have been, so that it sometimes took an hour to make a few score yards of way.