“What’s that?” exclaimed Lilian. But he had seen it as soon as she had, and placed himself in front of her. It was a human skull, standing on a ledge of rock about breast-high, and the eyeless sockets and white teeth looked ghastly enough, grinning at them dimly through the darkness. In an instant he had laid hold of it and jerked it away out of the cave down into the bush beneath.
“What was it?” she repeated.
“Only a stone. A rolling one, like yours truly. I don’t suppose it has stopped yet.”
He was glad she had not seen the hideous thing, and lighting another match he peered cautiously around, lest there should be a second skull. There was, but it was lying on the ground with the face turned away from them, and Lilian took it for a stone. There would have been to her something horribly ghastly in these grisly death’s-heads, lying there in that gloomy cavern, just faintly visible by the flickering light of the match he carried.
“That’s all right,” he said, as they returned to the light. “I didn’t much think we should find anything very terrific, but it’s as well to look. Sometimes a snake takes up his quarters in a place like this.”
“What’s this?” cried she, as something crackled beneath her feet.
“Oh, some of those old bones the Baas was telling us about. I don’t suppose there’s much left of them now, five-and-twenty years after.”
Lilian shuddered slightly.
“Let’s get into the air again,” she said. “This place is rather awesome.”
“Very well. But look, here are the Bushman drawings.”