cape, how should he? The Arab
was a man of great readiness of resource, of indomitable courage, and
powerfully built. If such a one had succumbed, why should he, Laurence,
fare any better? He sat down once more, and, gazing upon the sorry
remnant of his late confederate, began to think.

What a strange, vast, practical joke was that thing called life. Here
was he at the end of it, and the very means of ending it for him had, at
the same time, put him into possession of that which rendered it worth
having at all. He felt the stones lying hard and angular in his pockets,
he even took out one of them and turned it over sadly in his hands. He
would gladly give a portion of these to be standing on the summit of
yonder cliff instead of at the base; not yet had he come to feel he
would gladly give them all. It was only of a continuance with what life
had brought him that he should be there at all. He had sacrificed
himself for another. The sublimity of the act even yet did not strike
him. He regarded it as half-humorous, half-idiotic,--the first because
his cynical creed was bolstered up by the consciousness that Holmes
would never more than half appreciate it; the last, because--well--all
unselfishness, all consideration, was idiotic.

Then it occurred to him that it would be time enough to sit down and
dream when he had exhausted all expedients, and he had not explored that
side of the hollow at all yet. To this end he moved forward. A very
brief scrutiny, however, of the face of the cliff sufficed to show that
for climbing purposes the cracks and crannies were useless.

Ha! What was this? A cave or a rift? Right in front of him the cliff
yawned in just such a rift as the one in which he had awakened to find
himself, only not on anything like such a large scale. Eagerly Laurence
plunged into this. Here might be a way to the outer world--to safety.

He pressed onward in the semi-gloom. The rocks darkened overhead,
forming, in effect, a cave. And now it seemed that he could hear a
strange, soft, scraping, a kind of sighing noise. A puff-adder was his
first thought, looking around for the reptile. But no such reptile lay
in his path, and he had no means of striking a light. With a dull
shrinking, his flesh creeping with a strange foreboding, as with the
consciousness of some fearful prescience, he decided to push on, being
careful, however, to tread warily. This was no time for sticking at
trifles.

But as he advanced the