Half an hour later the whole party looked quite different. They were clean again, and had on spotless clothes. How tired they looked, thought the girls. But perhaps they were only hungry!
Yamen had prepared a marvellous meal. The smell of cooking came up from the big kitchen, and the five travellers could hardly wait for the first dish to appear — a thick, delicious soup, almost a meal in itself!
The boys had never eaten so much before. Ranni and Pilescu put away enormous quantities, too. Paul had to stop first. He put down his spoon with a sigh, leaving some of his pudding on his plate.
“I can’t eat any more,” he said, and his eyelids began to close. Pilescu gathered him up in his arms to carry him to bed. Paul struggled feebly, half asleep
“Put me down, Pilescu! I don’t want to be carried! How could you treat me like a weakling?”
“You are no weakling, little lord!” said Pilescu. “Did you not rescue me and Ranni by your own strength and wisdom? You are a lion!”
Paul liked hearing all this. “Oh, well, Mike and Jack are lions too,” he said, and gave an enormous yawn. He was asleep before he reached his bedroom, and Pilescu undressed him and laid him on the bed, fast asleep!
The girls hung on to Mike and Jack, asking questions and making them tell their story time and again.
“We were so worried about you!” said Nora. “When the villagers came and said they couldn’t find any of you, it was dreadful. And oh, that terrible storm! We hoped and hoped you were not caught in it.”
“Well, we were,” said Jack, remembering. “And it was all because of that storm, and the torrents of rain that came with it, that the waterfall in the cave became so tremendous and swelled up the river that ran from it. I wonder if the robbers got down safely! My word, if they got down to where they left their raft, and got on to it, they’d go down that river at about sixty miles an hour!”