No doubt those seas are wild and stormy enough at certain times and seasons. Indeed I myself have found them so, but placid and peaceful enough were they all the time our heroes were there.
The birds were numerous enough and beautiful, yet all but songless. Everywhere the flowers were gorgeous. And butterflies as large as fans, but far more radiant in their rainbow beauty, flitted from bush to bush revelling in the warm sunshine.
Being somewhat of a naturalist, Johnnie determined to make a collection of these. It is a delightful fancy, this of butterfly hunting, for although it is against my own principles to take life, or deprive a summer’s day of anything that is beautiful, still these creatures are numerous enough, and hardly suffer pain when caught and killed by pinching the thorax, or with chloroform.
Anyhow, with their nets, Peggy and Johnnie, sometimes Willie being with them, and always Ralph, spent many a happy hour.
But one day they wandered farther a-field than usual, and presently found themselves nearing a wood, where the trees were higher than any they had yet seen, and where there was but little undergrowth, the stems rising tall and pillar-like straight into the air, and mingling their palm-like leaves to form a canopy of green.
Had they taken the faithful hound’s advice they would have turned back at once, for he stopped at the entrance of the forest, and sniffed the air suspiciously, and it was with something like terror in his eyes, and with evident reluctance, that he followed his little master and mistress into the gloomy depths.
Nor was it long before the two became conscious of a sickly, death-like odour that went straight round their hearts.
Then all at once they found themselves in one of the most awful places that pen can describe, a temple built of human bones. They felt a kind of terrible fascination steal over them as they gazed with fear and terror at the walls around them.
Ghastly designs with long bones and spines and ribs, a fearful species of rude architecture; the walls of the avenue that led to the oval interior, the walls of the temple itself, and even a raised platform—no need to say for what dread purpose this had been built—all were built of human bones. Climbing wild flowers trailed here and there over the walls, little lizards crept in and out of eyeless sockets, and bright-winged birds perched innocently on rain-bleached skulls!
No wonder Peggy clutched Johnnie’s hand.