"We buried the boat on the bank, and you youngsters had better be at great pains to take your bearings, in case anything happens; and for a sign we'll lash that pole and its bit of rag to the top of a tree. Up you go, Venning, and make it fast."
The pole with its dirty flag was lashed to a tall tree, and then they waited for Muata. The jackal was the first to make its appearance, but the chief was not long after, and the river-man, a few minutes later, looking quite exhausted. The chief first ate, then he washed, then at last he condescended to take notice of things, and then to give particulars. He had followed the trail of the cannibals. It led straight into the forest. They could follow in the morning.
With the morning came a heavy white mist that made travelling impossible, and all they could do was to wait in the mugginess until, through a window in the sluggish clouds which hung low overhead, the sun shot its rays and sucked up the moisture. Then they started, and a minute later they were in the silence and the gloom of the most tremendous extent of unbroken wood on the face of the earth—a Sahara of leaves, stretching away to the east for five hundred miles, and reaching over the same extent north and south. Trackless, the forest was, to any one not acquainted with its secrets; but there were paths through it, and the villagers had made their own approaches to the main system of thoroughfares, so that the going was not difficult, especially as the direction up to a certain distance had been decided upon by the previous day's tracking.
They had, however, to walk in single file, with much care to their steps, for the obstacles were ceaseless in the way of trailing vines, saplings, and fallen trees. The narrow and tortuous avenue they threaded was gloomy in the extreme, affording scarcely any glimpse of the sky, and opening out no vistas between the serried ranks of steins, each clothed in a covering of velvet moss, and all looped together by the parasitical vines, whose boles were often as thick as cables.
As they plunged deeper into the woods over a yielding surface of leaf-mould, which sent up a warm smell, the silence was as the silence of a huge cavern, into which is borne the hollow rumbling of the waves, the sound in place of that being the continual murmur of the sea of leaves moved by a breeze ever so slight, so soft that no chance breath of it found its way below.
Yet the place was not really silent, and by-and-by, as their ears grew attuned to the new surroundings, the boys detected the sounds made by living things large and small, far and near—sounds which seemed a part of the silence, because they were all soft and a little mysterious, with a pause in between, as if the insect or creature which made them was listening to find if any enemy had heard him. They were little detached sounds, as if an insect would start out to sing its song, and then suddenly think better of it; and even when some large animal made its presence known by the snapping of a branch, or a sudden scurry in the undergrowth, the noise ceased almost as soon as it began.
"It gives me the creeps," muttered Venning, after a long silence.
"That's just it," said Compton; "everything appears to be creeping."
"Even the trees. They seem to watch and whisper and wait, and the news of our coming has been carried right away for miles. Shouldn't wonder if the trees were to close in and shut us up."
"Oh, come, now; that's a bit too fanciful."