ch was right, since for some reason or other the stairs
thenceforward remained more perfect. Only they seemed almost endless,
and before we reached our goal I calculated that we must have descended
quite twelve hundred feet into the bowels of the rock. At length, when I
was almost tired out and Maqueda was so breathless that she was obliged
to lean on Oliver, dragging me behind her like a dog on a string, of a
sudden we saw a glimmer of daylight that crept into the tunnel through a
small hole. By the mouth of yet another pit or shaft, we found Shadrach
and the others waiting for us. Saluting, he said that we must unrope,
leave our lamps behind, and follow him. Oliver asked him whither this
last shaft led.

"To a still lower level, lord," he answered, "but one which you will
scarcely care to explore, since it ends in the great pit where the Fung
keep their sacred lions."

"Indeed," said Oliver, much interested for reasons of his own, and he
glanced at Quick, who nodded his head and whistled.

Then we all followed Shadrach to find ourselves presently upon a plateau
about the size of a racquet court which, either by nature or by the hand
of man, had been recessed into the face of that gigantic cliff. Going
to the edge of this plateau, whereon grew many tree-ferns and some thick
green bushes that would have made us invisible from below even had there
been any one to see us, we saw that the sheer precipice ran down beneath
for several hundred feet. Of these yawning depths, however, we did not
at the moment make out much, partly because they were plunged in shadow
and partly for another reason.

Rising out of the gulf below was what we took at first to be a rounded
hill of black rock, oblong in shape, from which projected a gigantic
shaft of stone ending in a kind of fretted bush that alone was of the
size of a cottage. The point of this bush-like rock was exactly opposite
the little plateau on to which we had emerged and distant from it not
more than thirty, or at most, forty feet.

"What is that?" asked Maqueda, of Shadrach, pointing in front of her, as
she handed back to one of the Mountaineers a cup from which she had been
drinking water.

"That, O Walda Nagasta," he answered, "is nothing else than the back
of the mighty idol of the Fung, which is shaped like a lion. The great
shaft of rock with the bush at the end of it is the tail of the lion.
Doubtless this platform on which we stand is a place whence the old
pr