As he sat and waited, whilst the seconds flew, his heart sank within him. The river narrowed. Black, ugly-looking rocks sprang up, like living things in mid-stream, and before him opened the ravine.
He saw its great walls rising, smooth and sheer, on either side of the river, and fading away in the distance, in the thick haze of the steaming, tropic day. He was fascinated by the rocks. He marvelled every instant that the canoe was not dashed to atoms. The surface of the water was now white with foam, in the midst of which the black rocks glistened in the sunlight. The canoe would rush towards one of these, as some swift beast of prey hurls itself upon its victim; and at the eleventh hour it would be whipped aside to go dancing, leaping on.
The ravine was like one of the pits we read of in Dante's Inferno. Its walls were precipitous and white, glaring in the sunshine. This was the gate that guarded the Hidden Valley.
Max had a sensation of passing through a railway-cutting in an express train. Little objects upon the steep banks--perhaps straggling plants, sprung from seeds which had fallen from above--were blurred and indistinct, flashing past like may-flies in the sunlight. There was the same rattling noise in his ears, quite distinguishable from the roar of the water beneath his feet.
For a moment he buried his face in his hands. A hundred thoughts went galloping through his brain, not one of which was complete. One gave place to another; there was no gap between them; they were like the films on a cinematograph.
And then came a murmuring in his ears which was something apart from the rattling sound we have mentioned, and the loud roar of the rapids. He looked up, with a white face, and listened. It seemed his heart had ceased to beat, and breathing consisted of inspiration only. The murmuring grew into a roar, and the roar into a peal of thunder--the cataract was ahead!
[CHAPTER XII--WHEN HOPE DIES OUT]
As the canoe rushed forward, Max Harden recognized himself for lost; he realized there was no hope. Resolved to meet his fate with all the fortitude he could command, he was yet sufficiently unnerved to stand upright in the canoe, which so rocked and swayed that he balanced himself with difficulty.
It was then that he looked down upon what seemed certain death. The river ended abruptly, as a cliff falls sheer to the sea. The walls of the ravine were folded back to the east and to the west, and between, the water went over the cataract in one long, unbroken wave.
Far below, extending to the north, was a broad plain, dotted here and there with trees which, in the haze of the tropic heat, appeared indistinct and restless, like weeds and pebbles at the bottom of deep, discoloured water. Beyond that were the broad, gleaming waters of the Kasai, rolling north-westward to the Congo.