CHAPTER TWO
The road wound its way down the gentle slope and leveled off some hundred yards before the main stone gates of the city. The gates were bordered by a huge stone wall some fifty feet high with battlements.
All of this, however, lay beyond the fifty-yard gap that cut the valley in half and separated the forest from the marble city. I stretched my neck to get a good look at the drop as we approached the wide stone bridge that crossed the gap. My heart dropped into my stomach when I saw the plunge. It was some quarter of a mile and ended in a roaring river that tumbled over rocks and around the curve of the hill to disappear out of sight around the bends to our left. The smooth, straight walls of the canyon meant if you dropped in there wasn’t any hope of getting out without
