One of the strangest journeys in the vast unwritten history of commercial advance was that made by the five men from the camp of the main expedition across the lower slopes of a mountain range—unmarked on any map, unnamed by any geographer—to the mysterious Simiacine Plateau. It almost seemed as if the wild, bloodshot eyes of their guide could pierce the density of the forest where Nature had held unchecked, untrimmed sway for countless generations. Victor Durnovo noted a thousand indications unseen by his four companions. The journey no longer partook of the nature of a carefully calculated progress across a country untrodden by a white man's foot; it was a wild rush in a straight line through unbroken forest fastness, guided by an instinct that was stronger than knowledge. And the only Englishman in the party—Jack Meredith—had to choose between madness and rest. He knew enough of the human brain to be convinced that the only possible relief to this tension was success.
Victor Durnovo would never know rest now until he reached the spot where the Simiacine should be. If the trees were there, growing, as he said, in solitary state and order, strangely suggestive of human handiwork, then Victor Durnovo was saved. If no such spot was found, madness and death could only follow.
To save his companion's reason, Meredith more than once drugged his food; but when the land began to rise beneath their feet in tentative, billow-like inequalities—the deposit of a glacial age—Durnovo refused to stop for the preparation of food. Eating dry biscuits and stringy tinned meat as they went along, the four men—three blacks and one white—followed in the footsteps of their mad pilot.
“We're getting to the mountains—we're getting to the mountains! We shall be there to-night! Think of that, Meredith—to-night!” he kept repeating with a sickening monotony. And all the while he stumbled on. The perspiration ran down his face in one continuous stream; at times he paused to wipe it from his eyes with the back of his hands, and as these were torn and bleeding, there were smears of blood across his cheeks.
The night fell; the moon rose, red and glorious, and the beasts of this untrodden forest paused in their search for meat to watch with wondering, fearless eyes that strange, unknown animal—man.
It was Durnovo who, climbing wildly, first saw the break in the trees ahead. He gave a muffled cry of delight, and in a few minutes they were all rushing, like men possessed, up a bare slope of broken shale.
Durnovo reached the summit first. A faint, pleasant odour was wafted into their faces. They stood on the edge of a vast table-land melting away in the yellow moonlight. Studded all over, like sheep in a meadow, were a number of little bushes, and no other vegetation.
Victor Durnovo stooped over one of these. He buried his face among the leaves of it, and suddenly he toppled over.
“Yes,” he cried as he fell, “it's Simiacine!”
And he turned over with a groan of satisfaction, and lay like a dead man.