Jack was the first to break the silence.
“Great heavens!” he exclaimed. “What an escape! What an awful monster! What a frightful death! And that poor animal—that saved us both! What shall we say to the princess? Talk of ‘traps’! If this gate was left open as a ‘trap’—and it looks to me so—we have reason indeed to be thankful!”
“What is it?” Leonard asked at last.
“A ‘devil-tree.’ It is a carnivorous tree. I’ve seen a small one before; in a forest in Brazil that we were working through. One of the dogs got caught in it and was nearly killed before we cut it free with our axes. And then it was badly hurt, and so was I; a branch caught hold of my hand and tore some of the flesh off it. And where we cut this branch it bled! A dark crimson-blue liquid oozed out that stank! Oh, there, I can’t tell you what the stench was like! I’ve smelt some bad smells in my time, but that beat anything I ever came across! But that was only a small bush. I had no idea they could grow into great flesh-eating monsters like this! Why, that thing must have been there a thousand—ah—two thousand years, I should say. Fully that.”
“But,” said Leonard, “why is it kept here? who feeds it—and—what—is—it—fed—on?”
He asked this last question slowly, and looked at the other in blank, horrified amazement.
“It can’t live without food,” he continued. “And it must want a lot too. Whoever can take the trouble to get it food of the only kind—as I suppose—that it would care for? And why is it there in the middle of that strange place? One would almost think it was kept there as a kind of show or curiosity; and yet—we have never heard about it all the time we have been here! And it is there, with the gate open, no fence to guard people, or notice to warn them. Well! It’s a mystery to me!”
But if they had been astounded and horror-stricken at what they had seen, they were still more mystified and upset by Ulama’s behaviour when they told her of their adventure; for she fainted right off and, when she recovered, seemed so overcome with terror as to be unable to say a word. No explanation would she give; save that now and then she murmured, almost in a moan, to herself,
“Then it is true! And I never knew! It is horrible—too horrible!”
When Leonard expressed his sorrow about the puma, she hardly seemed to notice it.