“It is only the ‘lost souls’,” said he.[12]
“The ‘lost souls‘!” exclaimed Kingsford. “What can you mean?” He began to think the other must be raving.
“I know no more than you do,” was Templemore’s reply. “So the Indians account for those sounds, and that is all I can tell you. Since I have been here they have serenaded me thus every night—even sometimes by day—and at times I have thought all the ‘lost souls’ from the Infernal Regions must have been let loose for my especial entertainment—or to frighten me to death or drive me mad—I know not which. I really think, if I had not had the company of this faithful beast—she always roars back defiance at them—I should have gone mad.”
Towards morning the sounds ceased, and sleep became possible for two or three hours. But when, at daylight, the Indians rose and ventured out, they found the great snake had been almost completely devoured. Only some bones and a few bits of skin were left.
[11] See Mr. Barrington Brown’s ‘Canoe and Camp Life Among the Indians of British Guiana,’ p. 71. He says these animals hunt in packs of as many as a hundred or more.
[12] See [foot-note], Chapter V., p. [52].
CHAPTER XXXVI.
THE END.
Templemore was carried, with much difficulty, to ‘Monella Lodge,’ where an attack of fever supervened, and it was nearly two weeks before the doctor pronounced him out of danger.
Carenna came over from her village to nurse him, and tended him as devotedly as she had Leonard. In the height of the fever he raved constantly of the great devil-tree, of gigantic serpents, of Monella, and of ‘lost souls’; and, mixed up with all, were a number of names strange to those who listened to him; for he had been too ill when found in the cavern to give more than a brief idea of the adventures he had passed through.