All of a sudden Josane turned. He sent one keen searching glance straight in front of him, and another from side to side.

"The Home of the Serpents is a horrible place," he said. "I have warned you that it is so. It is not too late now. The _Amakosi_ can yet turn back."

The awed solemnity of his tone could not fail to impress his hearers, especially two of them. The boding sense of oppression in the atmosphere, the utter wildness of the surroundings, the uneasy, mysterious nature of their quest, and the tall gaunt figure of the old Kafir standing in the semi-gloom beneath the funereal plumes of the straight stemmed euphorbia, like an oracle of misfortune--all this affected the imagination of two, at any rate, of these ordinarily hard-headed and practical men in a fashion they could scarcely have deemed possible. The third, however, was impervious to such influences.

There was too much involved in the material side of the undertaking.

No thought had he to spare apart from this; no scope was there for giving free rein to his imagination.

"I think I may say we none of us have the slightest idea of turning back!" he answered.

"Certainly not," a.s.sented the other two.

Josane looked fixedly at them for a moment. Then he said:

"It is good. Follow me--carefully, carefully. We do not want to leave a broad spoor."

The undergrowth among the straight stiff stems of the euphorbia looked dense and impenetrable as a wall. To the astonishment of the spectators, the old Kafir lay flat on his stomach, lifted the dense tangle just enough to admit the pa.s.sage of his body, for all the world as though he were lifting a heavy curtain, and slipped through.

"Come," he whispered from the other side, for he had completely disappeared from view. "Come--as I did. But do not rend the bushes more than is absolutely necessary."

They followed, worming their way in the same fashion about a dozen yards. Then an e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n of amazement, not unmixed with alarm, broke from the lips of Shelton, who was leading. It found an echo on those of the other two. Their first instinct was to draw back.

They had emerged upon a narrow ledge, not of rock, or even earth; a narrow ledge of soft, yielding, quaking moss. And it overhung what had the appearance of a huge natural well.

It literally overhung. By peering cautiously outward they could see a smooth perpendicular wall of red rock falling sheer and straight to a depth of nearly two hundred feet. Three sides of the hollow--itself not that distance in width--were similarly const.i.tuted, the fourth being a precipitous, well-nigh perpendicular slope, with a spa.r.s.e growth of stunted bushes jotting its rugged sides. A strange, gruesome looking hole, whose dismal depths showed not the smallest sign of life. Could this be the awesome, mysterious "Home of the Serpents?"

But Josane's next words disabused them on this point.

"Tarry not," he said. "Follow me. Do even as I do."

Right to the brink of this horrible abyss the bush grew in a dense jungly wall, and it was the roots of this, overgrown with an acc.u.mulation of moss and soil, that const.i.tuted the apology for a ledge along which they were expected to make their way. And there was a distance of at least sixty or seventy yards of this precarious footway, to miss which would mean a certain and terrible death.

It would have been something of an ordeal even had the foothold been firm. Now, however, as they made their way along this quivering, quaking, ladder-like pathway of projecting roots interleaved with treacherous moss, not one of the three was altogether free from a nervous and shaky sensation about the knees as he moved slowly forward, selecting the strongest-looking stems for hand-hold. Once a root whereon Hoste had put his foot gave way with a m.u.f.fled crack, letting his leg through the fearful pathway up to the thigh. An involuntary cry escaped him as, grasping a stem above him, he drew it forth with a supreme effort, and his brown visage a.s.sumed a hue a good many shades paler, as through the hole thus made he contemplated a little cloud of leaves and sticks swirling away into the abyss.

"Great Heaven!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. "Are we never coming to the end of this ghastly place?"

"How would you like to cross it running at full speed, like a monkey, as I was forced to do? I told you I had to fly through the air," muttered Josane, who had overheard. "The horror of it has only just begun--just begun. _Hau_! Did I not say it was going to be a horrible place?"

But they were destined to reach the end of it without mishap, and right glad were they to find themselves crawling along a narrow ledge overhung by a great rock, still skirting the abyss, but at any rate there was hard ground under them; not a mere shaky network of more or less rotten roots.

"Is this the only way, Josane?" said Eustace at length, as they paused for a few minutes to recover breath, and, truth to say, to steady their nerves a trifle. Even he put the question with some diffidence, for as they drew nearer and nearer to the locality of their weird quest the old Gcaleka's manner had undergone a still further change. He had become morose and taciturn, gloomy and abstracted to a degree.

"It is not," he answered. "It is the only way I know. When I came here my eyes were shut; when I went away they were open. Then I approached it from above; now we have approached from below. The way by which I left, is the way you have seen."

"O Lord! I wouldn't travel the last infernal hundred yards again for a thousand pounds," muttered Hoste ruefully. "And now, I've got to do it again for nothing. I'd sooner run the gauntlet of the whole Gcaleka tribe, as we did before."

"We may have to do that as well," remarked Shelton. "But I think I never did see such an utterly dismal and G.o.d-forsaken corner in my life.

Looks as if Old Nick had built it out of sheer devilment."

There was reason in what he said. The immense funnel-like hole seemed an extraordinary caprice of Nature. Nothing grew at the bottom but coa.r.s.e herbage and a few stunted bushes. It seemed absolutely lacking in _raison d'etre_. Occurring at the top of a mountain, it would at once have suggested an ancient crater. Occurring, as it did, in solid ground on the steep slope of a lofty river bank that theory seemed not to hold good. On all sides, save the narrow defile they had come through, it was shut in by lofty wooded heights breaking here and there into a red iron-stone cliff.

Their guide resumed his way, advancing in a listening att.i.tude, and with intense caution. The ledge upon which they crept, now on all-fours, widened considerably. The projecting rock overhead jutted out further and further, till it overhung the abyss for a considerable distance.

Beneath its shade they were already in semi-gloom. Crawling along, toilsomely, laboriously, one behind the other, each man with all his senses, all his faculties, on the alert, the fact that their guide had stopped came upon them as a surprise. Then, as they joined him, and crouched there side by side--each man's heart beat quicker, each man's face slightly changed colour. For the overhanging rock had heightened-- the ledge had widened to an area of fifteen or twenty feet. Flooring and rock-roof no longer met. At the bottom of this area, both yawned away from each other in a black horizontal rift.

Save through this rift there was no getting any further. Quickly each mind grasped the solution. The cave yawning in front of them was--

"Where does that hole lead to, Josane?" said Hoste.

"_Kwa 'zinyoka_," replied the Gcaleka, impressively.

Such creatures are we of the light and air, that it is safe to a.s.sert that not even the boldest among us can undertake the most cursory exploration into the bowels of the earth without a consciousness of ever so slight a sobering influence, a kind of misgiving begotten of the idea of darkness and weight--a feeling as though the cavern roof might crush down upon us, and bury us there throughout the aeons of eternity. It is not surprising, therefore, that our three friends--all men of tried courage--should sit down for a few minutes, and contemplate this yawning black hole in dubious silence.

It was no reflection on their courage, either. They had just dared and surmounted a peril trying and frightful enough to tax the strongest nerves--and now before them lay the entrance to an unknown _inferno_; a place bristling with grim and mysterious terrors such as even their stout-hearted guide--the only man who knew what they were--recoiled from braving again. They could hardly believe that the friend and fellow-countrymen, whom all these months they had reckoned among the slain, lay near them within that fearful place, alive, and perchance unharmed. It might be, however, that the cavern before them was but a tunnel, leading to some hidden and inaccessible retreat like the curious crater-like hollow they had just skirted.

"_Au_!" exclaimed Josane, with a dissatisfied shake of the head. "We cannot afford to _sleep_ here. If we intend to go in we must do so at once."

There was reason in this. Their preparations were simple enough--and consisted in seeing that their weapons were in perfect readiness.

Eustace, too, had lighted a strong bull's-eye lantern with a closing slide. Besides this, each man was plentifully supplied with candles, which, however, it was decided, should only be used if a quant.i.ty of light became absolutely necessary.

Be it remembered not one of the three white men had other than the vaguest idea of the nature of the horrors which this gruesome place might disclose. Whether through motives of superst.i.tion or from whatever cause, Josane had hitherto preserved a remarkable silence on the subject. Now he said, significantly:

"Hear my words, Amakosi. Tread one behind the other, _and look neither to the right nor to the left, nor above. But look where you place your steps, and look carefully_. Remember my words, for I know that of which I speak."

They compared their watches. It was just half-past one. They sent a last long look at the sky and the surrounding heights. As they did so there rolled forth upon the heavy air a long, low boom of distant thunder. Then they fell into their places and entered the cavern, the same unspoken thought in each man's mind--Would they ever behold the fair light of day again?

And the distant, muttering thunder peal, hoa.r.s.e, heavy, sullen, breaking upon the sultry air, at the moment when they left the outer world, struck them as an omen--the menacing voice of outraged Nature booming the knell of those who had the temerity to seek to penetrate her innermost mysteries.

CHAPTER FORTY FOUR.

INFERNO.

For the first forty yards the roof of the cave was so low that they had to advance in a stooping posture. Then it heightened and the tunnel widened out simultaneously. Eustace led the way, his bull's-eye lantern strapped around him, throwing a wide disk of yellow light in front.

Behind him, but keeping a hand on his shoulder in order to guide him, walked Josane; the other two following in single file.

A turn of the way had shut out the light from the entrance. Eustace closing the slide of the lantern for a moment, they were in black, pitchy darkness.

A perceptible current of air blew into the cavern. That looked as if there should be an outlet somewhere. Old Josane, while enjoining silence upon the rest of the party, had, from the moment they had entered, struck up a low, weird, crooning song, which sounded like an incantation. Soon a glimmer of light showed just in front.

"That is the other way in," muttered old Josane. "That is the way I came in. The other is the way I came out. _Hau_!"

An opening now became apparent--a steep, rock shaft, reaching away into the outer air. It seemed to take one or more turnings in its upward pa.s.sage, for the sky was not visible, and the light only travelled down in a dim, chastened glimmer as though it was intercepted in its course.

An examination of this extraordinary feature revealed the fact that it was a kind of natural staircase.

"This is the way I came in. Ha!" muttered Josane again, with a glare of resentment in his eyes as though recalling to mind some particularly ignominious treatment--as he narrowly scrutinised the slippery, rocky sides of the shaft.

"I suppose it'll be the best way for us to get out," said Hoste.

"Anything rather than that devil of a scramble again."