“You know best.  Lead on, and I will follow.  Are these rifts you speak of wide?”

“They are easily jumpable by daylight; but how we shall do them in the dark, I don’t know.  However, these horses are as nimble as cats, and almost as keen-sighted.  I think, if we leave it to them, they will carry us safely over.  The sky is a little clearer, too, and that will count in our favor.  This way!”

We sped on as swiftly and silently as the spectre horseman of the story, for Venezuelan horses being unshod and their favorite pace a gliding run (much less fatiguing for horse and rider than the high trot of Europe) they move as noiselessly over grass as a man in slippers.

“Look out!” cried Carmen, reining in his horse.  “We are not far from the first grip.  Don’t you see something like a black streak running across the grass?  That is it.”

“How wide, do you suppose?”

“Eight or ten feet.  Don’t try to guide your horse.  He won’t refuse.  Let him have his head and take it in his own way.  Go first; my horse likes a lead.”

Pizarro went to the edge of the rift, stretched out his head as if to measure the distance, and then, springing over as lightly as a deer, landed safely on the other side.  The next moment Carmen was with me.  After two or three more grips (all of unknown depth, and one smelling strongly of sulphur) had been surmounted in the same way, we came to the stream.  The bank was so steep and slippery that the horses had to slide down it on their haunches (after the manner of South American horses).  But having got in, we had to get out.  This proved no easy task, and it was only after we had floundered in the brook for twenty minutes or more, that Carmen found a place where he thought it might be possible to make our exit.  And such a place!  We were forced to dismount, climb up almost on our hands and knees, and let the horses scramble after us as they best could.

“That is the last of our difficulties,” said Carmen, as we got into our saddles.  “In ten minutes we strike the road, and then we shall have a free course for several hours.”

“How about the patrols?  Do you think we have given them the slip?”

“I do.  They don’t often come as far as this.”

We reached the road at a point where it was level with the fields; and a few miles farther on entered a defile, bounded on the left by a deep ravine, on the right by a rocky height.

And then there occurred a startling phenomenon.  As the moon rose above the Silla of Caracas, the entire savanna below us seemed to take fire, streams as of lava began to run up (not down) the sides of the hills, throwing a lurid glare over the sleeping city, and bringing into strong relief the rugged mountains which walled in the plain.

“Good heavens, what is that!” I exclaimed.

“It is the time of drought, and the peons are firing the grass to improve the land,” said Carmen.  “I wish they had not done it just now, though.  However, it is, perhaps, quite as well.  If the light makes us more visible to others, it also makes others more visible to us.  Hark!  What is that?  Did you not hear something?”