Long into the night sat the pair, crouching over their camp fire, for though the days were hot the nights were bitterly cold, even in that valley between the two ranges of mountains; and while Dick gazed abstractedly aloft into the velvet blackness at the innumerable stars that glittered above him through the frosty atmosphere, Phil spoke of the strange dreams--which he persisted, half-jestingly and half in earnest, in regarding as memories--that visited him so frequently, of curious scenes that he had witnessed and remarkable deeds that he had done in the far past, either in imagination or reality, he could not possibly say which. And while he talked and Dick listened, vacillating between amusement and conviction, some twenty stalwart figures, thin and aquiline of feature, copper-hued of skin, and strangely clothed, came creeping up out of the darkness until they reached a clump of bush within earshot of the pair, where they lurked, waiting patiently until the audacious intruders upon their most sacred territory should resign themselves to sleep--and to a captivity which, as planned by the chief figure of the group, was to be of but brief duration, ending in a death of unspeakable horror. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN. HOW THEY FOUND AN ENORMOUS TREASURE, AND TOOK IT HOME. It was past midnight, and the camp fire, which Dick had bountifully replenished with stout branches from the neighbouring clump of bush, the last thing before stretching himself out to sleep, had dwindled to a mass of dull red smouldering embers, when the white-clad figure of an elderly man, copper-hued, bald-headed, and clean shaven, approached with stealthy footsteps the recumbent bodies of the two slumbering Englishmen. Bending over first one and then the other, he held a saturated cloth toward their nostrils in such a manner that the sleepers were permitted to inhale, for about a minute each, the faint, fragrant fumes that emanated from it; then, abandoning all further caution, he withdrew from the fire a half-consumed branch and waved it in the air until the smouldering stump was fanned afresh into flame; when, the torch having served its purpose as a signal, he flung it back upon the almost extinguished fire. A couple of minutes later those to whom this man had signalled approached the camp fire, and while two parties of four each raised the recumbent and now unconscious figures of the Englishmen to their shoulders, the remainder carefully gathered together and took possession of the weapons and other belongings of their prisoners, after which, at a signal from their leader the entire party moved off, marching inland away from the lake. Relieving each other at frequent intervals, for they found their unconscious burdens heavy-- especially those who were told off to carry Dick--the party marched a distance of nearly eight miles, until, in a sequestered valley among the hills, they reached the ruins of what had evidently at one time been a