ntain
side at their best speed, being impatient to reach the fertile,
cultivated country bordering the lake below.

But the task was not by any means so easy as it had first appeared, for
they had scarcely gone a mile when they unexpectedly found themselves at
the verge of a long line of precipitous cliffs overlooking the great
basin in which lay the lake and the city. It was by no means a pleasant
situation in which they found themselves, for they were standing upon a
steep slope, clad with short, dry grass, almost as slippery as ice to
walk upon, and this steep slope ended abruptly in a precipice which
Earle, going down upon his stomach and peering cautiously over the edge,
declared could be not less than six or seven thousand feet high. So
terrible was the shock it gave him to find himself overhanging and
gazing down into that dizzy void, that it induced a violent attack of
vertigo, causing him to scream out that he was falling, and to beg those
who were holding him to pull him back. They, of course, did so at once;
but several minutes elapsed before the adventurous gazer sufficiently
recovered his nerve to stand, and when he did so he was bathed in a cold
perspiration, while his teeth chattered to such an extent that it was
some time before he could distinctly articulate.

"Never had such a fearful shock in my life," he afterwards explained to
Dick. "Of course, I knew that the valley was an enormous depth below
us, but when I undertook to peer over the edge of the cliff I did not
for a moment anticipate that I was going to find myself hanging over a
sheer void, thousands of feet deep. I expected to find below me a
precipitous cliff seamed and scarred with innumerable irregularities and
projections, by means of which an ordinarily active man might easily
make his way down; but, man alive, this precipice is sheer, from top to
bottom like the wall of a house, without a single projection, so far as
I could see, big enough for a fly to settle upon. It was awful to find
myself lying there, with my heels higher than my head, gazing down into
that dizzy hollow, at the bottom of which tall trees looked no higher
than pins, and to feel that if I dared to move a muscle I should
inevitably go sliding over, head first!"

"Ay," assented Dick. "I think I know the kind of feeling. I
experienced something very like it myself the first time I climbed to
the height of the royal yard. The hull of the ship below me looked so