Their further progress was prevented by an encircling cliff, high and unassailable. It was over this that the head-waters of the river poured, forming in their descent the falls, whose shattered and buoyant spray floated above the trees. The wall seemed impregnable, a sheer verticality actually leaning forward so that the falls, dripping in a descent of more than a hundred feet, arched forward and left behind them a deep recess, a cold drenched cavern. Into this, behind the thundering solidity of the continuous sheet of water, leaping from the sunlight above, where its coruscating folds entwined, to the rayless depth in the forest-land below, Ogga and Lhatto carefully peered and entered. They were in strange and unusual surroundings; they moved in a sort of semi-conical cave, almost dark from the interception of the outer light by the falls that seemed scarcely translucent. Groping backward to the rock, Lhatto, exclaiming with surprise, called Ogga to her, and showed a crevice running upward in the beds of rock through which a crepuscular light, apparently shining from above, was seen. Hesitatingly Ogga crept into the gash, which was almost dry. He disappeared for a moment, then his voice calling Lhatto summoned her, and the girl crept after him. The crevice, cleaving the vertical schists, ran upward at such an oblique angle, and so discontinuously, being somewhat faulted in its ascent, that without cutting across the floor of the stream it passed the falls, piercing to the light at some point on the table-land above. It was just possible to squeeze through this cryptic passage, but it offered no real danger or difficulty, the very closeness of its parallel sides affording constant support.
Lhatto and Ogga went on, and after some not unusual and helpful exercise, emerged upon an upper elevation, a sort of mesa-land, crowned by the ranges from whose boisterous crests the storm of the last night had descended. They had indeed turned the northern edge of this Sierra and before them, in the purple and indistinguishable shadowed distances, where peaks and minarets and sculptured stone seemed melting together in a vaporous uncertainty, lay the Canyon Country, and far westward, shining in all his ermine and beryl hues, Zit remained unchanged. The Fire-Breather had withdrawn to the earth and again lay still.