thoughtfully. "Here, let's camp for a
bit."

At these words, Quong, who had been rocking himself quietly to and fro,
jumped off his bundle, looked sharply about him, and then made a run for
a niche in the side of the gorge right up in the entrance, where the
sides literally overhung.

Here he placed his pack, and began to collect wood, descending toward
the river to where a large tree, which had been swept down the gorge
when the river was much higher, now lay beached and stripped, and
thoroughly dry. He attacked it at once with the axe, and had soon
lopped off enough of the bare branches to make a fire, and these he
piled up in the niche he had selected, and started with a match, the
inflammable wood catching at once; while I took the axe and went on
cutting, as Quong unfastened the kettle and looked around for water.

There was plenty rushing along thirty or forty feet below us, but it was
milky-looking with the stone ground by the glaciers far up somewhere in
the mountain. That, of course, had to be rejected.

"Make mouth bad," Quong said, and he climbed up to where a tiny spring
trickled down over a moss-grown rock so slowly that it took ten minutes
to fill our kettle.

"This is a bit of a puzzle," said Gunson, as he sat calmly smoking his
pipe and gazing up the terrible gorge; and I was returning from the
fire, where I had been with a fresh armful of wood, leaving Esau
patiently chopping in my place.

"Puzzles can be made out," I said.

"Yes, and we are going to make this one out, Gordon, somehow or another.
What an echo!"

He held up his hand, and we listened as at every stroke of Esau's axe
the sound flow across the river, struck the rock there and was thrown
back to our side, and then over again, so that we counted five distinct
echoes growing fainter as they ran up the terribly dark, jugged rift,
till they died away.

"Can't we find some other way?" I said, for I felt awe-stricken by the
rushing water, the forbidding nature of the rocks as they towered up,
and the gloom of the place, in which quite a mist arose, but there was
no sun to penetrate the fearful rift, and tint the thin cloud with
rainbow hues.

"I'm afraid not, Gordon," he replied. "I fancy that there is a track
along there that has been used, and that we might use in turn. If I can
convince myself that it is so, we English folk must not turn our backs
upon it. Such a ravine as that cannot be very long. Will you try?"

I wante