So far little had been said between the young men and their strange host as to the objects and details of their enterprise. The circumstances of their introduction had been so unusual that the discussion had been tacitly postponed until Leonard should have recovered sufficiently to take part in it. And even then, when Jack had broached the subject, Monella had remarked,
“You had better wait till you have been to my cabin near Roraima, when I can better explain the nature of the undertaking. Then, if you do not care to join me in it, or we seem unlikely to get on well together, we will part friends and you will merely have had an interesting bit of travelling.” So all farther explanation had been adjourned.
“I call this more than a ‘cabin,’” said Leonard, when they had had time to make a sort of tour of inspection. “I think we ought to give it a better name. Suppose we call it ‘Monella Lodge.’” And ‘Monella Lodge’ it was henceforth called.
CHAPTER V.
IN THE ‘DEMONS’ WOOD.’
The following day, Monella led the two friends to the road he had begun to cut into Roraima Forest; but first he showed them two llamas that were kept in a rough corral near his dwelling.
“I brought them all the way from the other side of the continent,” he said. “You know that there they are the only beasts of burden, and in this country there are none. They will be useful to us later.”
As to the so-called ‘road,’ it was really but a pathway; and, in places, almost a kind of tunnel. The great trees of this primæval forest were so high and dense that but little daylight penetrated to the ground beneath; and on all sides the undergrowth was so thick and tangled that almost every foot had to be cut out with the axe. Here and there one could see for a few yards between the giant trunks, and at these spots the path had been made wider. One curious thing Jack noted: the path did not start from that part of the wood opposite to ‘Monella Lodge’; nor even from the margin of the wood itself.
Asked why this was, Monella thus made answer: “If in our absence others should come here, they might hunt up and down for the path a long time before they hit upon it—and very likely never find it. On this stony ground the tracks we leave are very slight and difficult to trace.”
“But,” said Jack, “your Indians know the way.”