“I was thinking of that,” Jim told him. They stopped and looked at each other.

“Suppose we were there more than one round of the clock?”

“I don’t believe so. It’s a safe bet we were there twenty-four hours, or nearly. I was depending on the plane clock, so didn’t wear a watch.”

“Red cribbed mine when he was searching me,” Bob said quietly.

“Eh, why didn’t you tell him it was a relation of the green emerald rings?” Jim chuckled. “Mills was certainly afraid of them.”

“I thought of that, but I should worry. Gosh, Red surely—”

“Here we are on a second terrace,” Jim interrupted for he wanted Bob to forget, as fast as he could, that experience at the rotten log where Red had met his fate.

“Must have been a wonderful structure this,” Bob answered. He understood why Jim had cut in, and was as anxious as the older boy to get the troubles of the last twenty-four hours out of his mind.

“Seems to me I hear something, a sort of tapping,” said Jim. They stood still and listened, every nerve tense, but gradually they relaxed for the place was as silent as the bottom of the deepest unopened tomb in the universe.

“Hear it now?”

“Guess it was my imagination. Come on.” They started again, crossed the second terrace, and several times they paused to scan the sky. In fact, they were far more interested in what might come out of the path of the blazing sun than what they would discover on terra-firma, for they both felt confident that their absence had not passed unobserved by their friends at the barracks.

“Figuring that we tramped twelve or fifteen hours all together, how many miles do you believe we covered?” Jim asked when they stopped to rest on the third terrace.

“Sometimes we went pretty slowly,” Bob answered.

“I know. I was trying to dope it out as we went along. It didn’t seem to me as if the passage made many turns, but that’s hard to tell because it went up and down, across rivers and probably under sections of the mountains.”

“Sure, but it seems to me we can’t be as much as a hundred miles from the top of that little hill, where we started. To be sure, it wasn’t very high, but for natives to have a covered 

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