Their guide, who was immediately behind them on the swaying ladder,
took the lead as soon as the three stood side by side on the summit,
and escorted them down the long passage. Before they started he
took from a bracket in the wall a kind of torch, made of some
resinous wood unfamiliar to the boys. Striking piece of flint
against his spear blade he soon produced light and holding the torch
high above his head, so that its light shone on the walls, rendered
glossy by the rub of uncounted ages of greasy elbows and bodies, he
led the way down the passage. The boys could feel that after
walking a short distance it took a sudden rise and yet further a
cool wind began to blow in their faces.

About a hundred yards from the spot where they first noticed the air
stirring in their hair the boys and their guide emerged on a scene
whose beauty at first shock almost took the lads' breath away.

Before them stretched a fertile valley neatly divided into patches--each
hedged off in squares in which flourished all sorts of vegetables,
including sweet corn and potatoes and several other less familiar
varieties. In pastures, fenced in with mathematical regularity by
hedges of the African cactus thorn, herds of humped cattle were feeding
contentedly in the mellow glow of the setting sun, occasionally lowing
softly, which latter made Billy, as he expressed it, "long for the old
farm."

The Winged Men likewise cultivated, it seemed, fruits of many kinds
and had also stockades in which poultry, of breeds strange to the
boys, but undoubtedly sprung from the aboriginal African fowl, were
abundant.