"I'm thinking they're worth watching," was Mackenzie's answer.
Next morning a slight change was made in the order of the march. Mackenzie asked Jackson to go ahead with Forrester, while he brought up the rear.
"I don't mind, but what's your reason?" Jackson asked.
"I just wish to contemplate the Chinkies from the rear," was the reply.
Whatever the result of his examination was, Mackenzie said nothing about it.
Towards mid-day the snow-clad peaks of a mountain range opened up ahead of the party; although in the clear atmosphere they seemed to be only a few miles distant, the nearest was probably fifty miles away. The intervening country was a series of undulations, bare stretches of rock, here and there deeply fissured, alternating with thickly wooded valleys and dense jungle. Ever since they left Dibrugarh the party had been steadily climbing, and the higher they rose, the less their progress was impeded by undergrowth; and the lower temperature made their exertions less fatiguing. But the white men were more and more impressed with the courage and endurance which Captain Redfern had shown in traversing this wild region.
They kept a keen look-out for hills answering to the names he had given them, for they had no other landmarks by which to direct their course. It was impossible to believe that they were peaks of the snowy range so far ahead: four days would not have sufficed for the covering of so immense a distance. Forrester was already feeling very doubtful of the possibility of distinguishing the hills, when Sher Jang suddenly pointed to the eastern end of a smaller range that crossed the prospect perhaps twenty miles away. It was a precipice falling away abruptly to the general level from a height of two or three thousand feet, and the contours of the scarp bore a strong resemblance to a monkey's face. Forrester swept his eyes along the range from east to west, and gave a cry of delight when he distinguished at the western end a rounded eminence shaped like the hump of a camel.
"We're on the right track," he said. "We shall have to round that range, then cut away northward to find the falls. Probably they won't be so easy to discover."
"It will be to-morrow night before we reach the Camel's Hump," said Jackson. "The falls can't be more than a day's march farther, or Redfern couldn't possibly have done it in four days."
"We go slower than he did, owing to our baggage. If we only came across some natives we might ask them the way, but the whole country seems to be uninhabited."