The latter gazed on the mountain gloomily. His mind went back to the morning when he saw it first and the vague forebodings that had then come into his mind.
“I don’t know,” he said doubtfully. “I have not brought away with me the most wonderful secret of all—the ‘Plant of Life.’ When I think how I was cheated out of that, by the mountain itself, as you may truly say—for its very rocks came crashing down to prevent my escape, or to kill me if I persisted; or at least, to insure my leaving nearly everything behind—when I think of this, it seems to me that Roraima has guarded most of its secrets pretty effectually, and I am almost persuaded there is something uncanny about it.”
Harry laughed at this; the more so that it came from Jack.
“That’s very fanciful—for you,” he returned. “If it had been Leonard, now, I should not have been surprised.”
“I am afraid my ideas of what is precisely practical and what is fanciful have been a good deal modified,” Jack confessed. “So would yours, if you had passed through my experiences.”
“Well, after all, perhaps you haven’t lost much,” Harry returned. “A small bundle of dried plants wouldn’t have been of much use, and as to the seeds, if, as I understand you, they only thrive high up on the mountains, I don’t see what you were going to do with them. Moreover, very likely they would have been eaten up by insects, or lost, or got wetted and spoiled, or something, before you got back or could have planted them in a likely spot.”
Then they continued their journey, staying that night in Daranato, where the great puma at first created a scare among the dusky inhabitants, but, showing friendliness towards all, she was soon the object of unbounded wonder and interest on every side.
Some two months later there was again a little dinner party at ‘Meldona,’ Mr. Kingsford’s residence, and the same faces were gathered round the hospitable board—all but Leonard Elwood’s. Maud looked charming and happy as she glanced, now and again, first at Jack Templemore’s bronzed face, and then at her brother, listening, not for the first time now, to her lover’s wondrous tale.
She and Stella had shuddered before at the accounts of the great tree and its victims, and of the horrors of the ‘haunted wood’; and had talked of Ulama and Zonella, and wondered, again and again, what they were like.
“Poor Leonard! I am sorry to lose him,” Maud said. “Yet, I suppose, he does not need pity; for he is to be envied in many ways. Fancy his dreamings—about which we used to tease him so—coming true after all!”