wash, and brushed our teeth. Greatest luxury imaginable, a
toothbrush, on this sort of expedition.

"Now," said Coppinger when we had emptied our pockets, "there's precious
little grub left, and it's none the better for being carried in a local
Spanish newspaper."

"Yours is mostly tobacco ashes."

"It'll get worse if we leave it. We've a lot more bad scrambling ahead
of us."

That was obvious. So we sat down beside the stream there at the bottom
of the barranca, and ate up all of what was left. It was a ten-mile
tramp to the fonda at Santa Brigida, where we had set down our traps;
and as Coppinger wanted to take a lot more photographs and measurements
before we left this particular group of caves, it was likely we should
be pretty sharp set before we got our next meal, and our next taste of
the PATRON'S splendid old country wine. My faith! If only they knew down
in the English hotels in Las Palmas what magnificent wines one could
get--with diplomacy--up in some of the mountain villages, the old
vintage would become a thing of the past in a week.

Now to tell the truth, the two mummies he had gathered already quite
satisfied my small ambition. The goatskins in which they were sewn up
were as brittle as paper, and the poor old things themselves gave out
dust like a puffball whenever they were touched. But you know what
Coppinger is. He thought he'd come upon traces of an old Guanche
university, or sacred college, or something of that kind, like the one
there is on the other side of the island, and he wouldn't be satisfied
till he'd ransacked every cave in the whole face of the cliff. He'd
plenty of stuff left for the flashlight thing, and twenty-eight more
films in his kodak, and said we might as well get through with the job
then as make a return journey all on purpose. So he took the crowbar,
and I shouldered the rope, and away we went up to the ridge of the
cliff, where we had got such a baking from the sun the day before.

Of course these caves were not easy to come at, or else they would have
been raided years before. Coppinger, who on principle makes out he
knows all about these things, says that in the old Guanche days they
had ladders of goatskin rope which they could pull up when they were at
home, and so keep out undesirable callers; and as no other plan occurs
to me, perhaps he may be right. Anyway the mouths of the caves were in
a more or less level row thirty feet below the ridge of the cliff, and
fi