was that the only important thing that could happen to us would
be starvation.

The afternoon of the last day was spent in skirting the foot of a very
long mountain, crowned at its southern extremity with a huge, rocky mass
resembling the head of a stone sphinx above its long, couchant body, and
at its highest part about a thousand feet above the surrounding level.
It was late in the day, raining fast again, yet the old man still toiled
on, contrary to his usual practice, which was to spend the last daylight
hours in gathering firewood and in constructing a shelter. At length,
when we were nearly under the peak, he began to ascend. The rise in this
place was gentle, and the vegetation, chiefly composed of dwarf thorn
trees rooted in the clefts of the rock, scarcely impeded our progress;
yet Nuflo moved obliquely, as if he found the ascent difficult, pausing
frequently to take breath and look round him. Then we came to a deep,
ravine-like cleft in the side of the mountain, which became deeper and
narrower above us, but below it broadened out to a valley; its steep
sides as we looked down were clothed with dense, thorny vegetation, and
from the bottom rose to our ears the dull sound of a hidden torrent.
Along the border of this ravine Nuflo began toiling upwards, and finally
brought us out upon a stony plateau on the mountain-side. Here he paused
and, turning and regarding us with a look as of satisfied malice in his
eyes, remarked that we were at our journey's end, and he trusted the
sight of that barren mountain-side would compensate us for all the
discomforts we had suffered during the last eighteen days.

I heard him with indifference. I had already recognized the place from
his own exact description of it, and I now saw all that I had looked to
see--a big, barren hill. But Rima, what had she expected that her face
wore that blank look of surprise and pain? "Is this the place where
mother appeared to you?" she suddenly cried. "The very place--this!
This!" Then she added: "The cave where you tended her--where is it?"

"Over there," he said, pointing across the plateau, which was partially
overgrown with dwarf trees and bushes, and ended at a wall of rock,
almost vertical and about forty feet high.

Going to this precipice, we saw no cave until Nuflo had cut away two or
three tangled bushes, revealing an opening behind, about half as high
and twice as wide as the door of an ordinary dwelling-house.

The next thing w