Then came several days' march through a plain strewn with sharp stones which lamed most of the party; and after this eighty or a hundred miles of dreary rolling veldt, clothed with rank grass just now brown with the winter frosts, that caught their feet at every step.
Now at length they halted on the boundary of the land of the People of the Mist.

There before them, not more than a mile away, towered a huge cliff or wall of rock, stretching across the plain like a giant step, far as the eye could reach, and varying from seven hundred to a thousand feet in height.

Down the surface of this cliff the river flowed in a series of beautiful cascades.
Before they had finished their evening meal of buck's flesh the moon was up, and by its light the three white people stared hopelessly at this frowning natural fortification, wondering if they could climb it, and wondering also what terrors awaited them upon its further side.

They were silent that night, for a great weariness had overcome them, and if the truth must be known, all three of them regretted that they had ever undertaken this mad adventure.
Leonard glanced to the right, where, some fifty paces away, the Settlement men were crouched round the fire.

They also were silent, and it was easy to see that the heart was out of them.
"Won't somebody say something ?" said Juanna at last with a rather pathetic attempt at playfulness.