Duncan reined his horse beside Morgan’s and studied the falls dismally. “In case you require a reply, that is called a waterfall. Any brilliant ideas?”

“No brilliant ones, I’m afraid.” Morgan moved his horse a few yards downstream to study the current patterns. “How deep do you think it is?”

“Deep enough,” Duncan replied. “Well over our heads. Besides, the horses could never get across in that current. We’d be swept away and battered to death—if we didn’t drown outright.”

“You’re probably right,” Morgan said. He reined in his horse once again, then turned in the saddle to peer up at the falls.

“How about going above the falls? We might be able to get across, even if the horses couldn’t.”

“It’s worth a look, I suppose.”

Swinging a leg over his saddle, Duncan jumped to the ground and shrugged his leather cloak back on his shoulders, letting his mount’s reins dangle. As he began scrambling up a fairly easy game track toward the falls, Morgan, too, dismounted and secured his mount, following close behind his kinsman.

They had traversed perhaps two-thirds the distance up the face of the cliff when Duncan froze momentarily, then scrambled onto an outcrop and turned to give Morgan a hand up. The ledge where the two found themselves seemed quite ordinary at first; but then Duncan drew Morgan’s attention to what had first caught his eye: a deep cleft in the rock, rising vertically for more than thirty feet until it was lost in a veil of mist from the thundering falls. They needed several treacherous steps to reach a point from which they could both peer into the cleft.

The opening was narrow, no more than five feet at its entrance, but from where they stood they could not see the back wall, lost in the shadows. The side walls, as far as the eye could see, were covered with a verdant growth of lichen and moss, the velvety perfection broken only by an occasional patch of ruby or topaz. In the floor of the cleft, which lay a few feet below the level at which they stood, a thin trickle of icy water welled out of a crack in the stony floor, the water so cold that the air above it condensed into shimmering mist where a narrow shaft of sunlight struck it.

The two of them gazed at the swirling mist in awe for several seconds, neither quite willing to break the mystical mood the place had cast. Then Duncan sighed, and the spell was broken. Together they peered more closely into the cleft beyond, returning their focus to their original concern.

“What do you think?” Morgan whispered. “Could it go all the way through?”

Duncan shrugged and lowered himself gingerly into the cleft to take a closer look, but after only a cursory incursion into the shadows, he turned and came back, shaking his head as he accepted Morgan’s hand up.

“No joy there, I’m afraid. It doesn’t go much farther than what you can see from here. Let’s see what’s at the top.”