Mounting, he quickly rejoined his friends, and the whole party strode out across the plain.
At the lake, however, a check awaited them. Moving down to the water’s edge, they looked round for the boat in which they had previously crossed, and which they had left drawn up high and dry upon the beach.
It was gone!
Thinking that they had perhaps mistaken the spot, they searched up and down the shore for a considerable distance; but all their seeking was vain. The skin boat had vanished.
“It’s the doing of the wolf-people,” asserted the Ayuti; “see, the hounds have scented them,” and he pointed to the three great dogs, who were sniffing along the shore, as though following a trail.
“Then there is nothing for it but to go round,” said Seymour, and forthwith they started, keeping a sharp look-out for the creatures who had robbed them of their boat. For two hours they strode forward along the shore; then, rounding the head of the lake and splashing across a shallow stream which here entered it, they struck off at a tangent into the jungle, the growths of which were at this point somewhat scattered, there being many open spaces between. Swiftly they moved, yet cautiously, their ears alert to catch the slightest suspicious sound. Once a herd of giant bison thundered across the track before them at a gallop; then a number of elk were sighted, to whom Muswani bellowed a challenge. Unheeding it, however, the brutes dashed swiftly away and disappeared.
The jungle seemed alive with game, but the adventurers had no time for the chase. Their only desire now was to get back to the city with all speed, and to this end they pressed on at their best pace.
Suddenly in the ground before them, its yawning mouth revealed by a clump of fungi growing close to the verge, appeared a black chasm. Some thirty feet by twelve in size, its walls descending sheer as those of a well as far as eye could penetrate into its gloom, it was as weird a place as one could wish to see; and from its dismal depths arose the boom of a waterfall.
“It’s a ghostly hole,” remarked Seymour, pausing for an instant on the brink, and peering downward. His friends, not noting that he had stopped, still held on, until a cry from behind caused them to pull up. Turning, they saw Seymour struggling on the very verge of the abyss with a wolf-man of gigantic stature. The perilous position of the struggling figures unnerved all but Chenobi. He, with a cry of rage, leapt to earth and sprang to the baronet’s assistance. But, ere he could reach the scene of the struggle Seymour and the savage pitched over the brink of the abyss, and, still grappling madly, hurtled into the gloomy depths below.
“Great Heaven!” Mervyn burst out despairingly; “he is lost! My poor friend!”