“‘Hush!’ whispered Dirk, in a trembling voice. ‘Listen!’ and he held up his hand for silence.
“I listened; and—believe me or not as you please, it is the solemn truth I’m telling you—that cave was full of queer little mysterious noises, like people whispering, and the soft tread of feet all about us. I looked, and Dirk looked, but we could see nothing; yet the sounds continued, now seeming to come from the back of the cave, and then all about us. I believe I should have been far less terrified if I could have seen anything to account for the sounds; but there was nothing. Panic seized me; I sprang to my feet and rushed, shrieking, out of the cave, dashing headlong right through our fire, and coming a terrible cropper on the rough, sloping ground in front of the cave. In falling I must have stunned myself, for I remember nothing more of what happened that night, but—and this I consider the most extraordinary part of the whole adventure—when I awoke next morning I found myself back in the cave again, lying upon my grass bed, with Dirk close alongside.”
“Ah!” I commented, “quite a queer dream. What had Van Ryn to say about it? I suppose you mentioned it to him?”
“I said dot it vas no dream; for shoost vot happened to Svorenssen, the same thing happened to me,” answered Van Ryn, speaking for himself.
“Well, of course, that was very remarkable,” I agreed. “Still, it could have been only a dream, since you found yourselves, I understand, in the cave and on your own beds in the morning.”
“Yah, dot vas so,” assented Van Ryn. “But vhen ve comes to overhaul ourselfs ve found dot our hands and faces vas badly skinned by our fall outside dot cave, und our hair and beards, as vell as our clothes, vas singed vhere ve had shoomped through the fire.”
“Indeed!” said I. “That was certainly remarkable—if you are both quite sure you did not imagine those very peculiar happenings.”
“If you mean about our skinned hands and faces, and our singed hair and clothes, there was no imagination about that,” asserted Svorenssen. “But about the other—well, when we came to talk about it in broad daylight we were unable to decide whether we had actually heard the sounds, or whether we had dreamed them. You see, it was not as though the thing happened once only; it happened several nights running, and at length it got upon our nerves to such an extent that we could endure it no longer; so we agreed to return to the beach and work our way along-shore, on the look-out for a break in the reef, abreast of which we proposed to camp in the hope that sooner or later a ship might come along, enter the lagoon, and take us off.”
“A most sensible plan,” said I, “and the only thing I am surprised at is that, to a couple of sailor-men like yourselves, the idea did not come much earlier.”
“Ay,” agreed Svorenssen, “it is a pity that it did not. Had it done so we should no doubt have discovered that you were still alive much earlier than we did, and found means to signal to you.”