At length, when we were nearly under the peak, he began to ascend.

The rise in this place was gentle, and the vegetation, chiefly composed of dwarf thorn trees rooted in the clefts of the rock, scarcely impeded our progress; yet Nuflo moved obliquely, as if he found the ascent difficult, pausing frequently to take breath and look round him.

Then we came to a deep, ravine-like cleft in the side of the mountain, which became deeper and narrower above us, but below it broadened out to a valley; its steep sides as we looked down were clothed with dense, thorny vegetation, and from the bottom rose to our ears the dull sound of a hidden torrent.
Along the border of this ravine Nuflo began toiling upwards, and finally brought us out upon a stony plateau on the mountain-side.

Here he paused and, turning and regarding us with a look as of satisfied malice in his eyes, remarked that we were at our journey's end, and he trusted the sight of that barren mountain-side would compensate us for all the discomforts we had suffered during the last eighteen days.
I heard him with indifference.

I had already recognized the place from his own exact description of it, and I now saw all that I had looked to see--a big, barren hill.