"Man or monkey, goat or devil, we'll overhaul the place this very afternoon." exclaimed Hislop, with increasing energy and anger; "but first we shall return with all expedition to the hut."
CHAPTER XXXV
THE MYSTERY SOLVED.
All day the air had been unusually sultry and breathlessly hot, even for the tropics at that season; but when the sun sank westward, when the air became cooler, and the shadows of the island, with its wooded bluff and towering blue mountain, across the slope of which the light gossamer clouds lay floating half-way up, were thrown far eastward over that lonely sea which no keel seemed ever to furrow, we prepared for a further exploration, or as Hugh Chute said, "to overhaul that ere cliff from truck to keelson."
Chute and Carlton were despatched to its base, by the way of the river bank, and to where the cascade poured over the rocks, waking the solemn echoes of the otherwise silent ravine.
Their instructions were, to station themselves near the rock which bore the Spanish legend—to keep a sharp look-out on the face of the cliff and all the way up to the grove of banana trees that grew on its summit.
Billy the cabin boy was left in charge of the hut and boat, while Hislop, with the rest of us advanced toward the cliff, up the sloping bank of which—its only accessible point—we proceeded to climb.
It was, or is (twelve months can make no change) a hundred and fifty feet in height, as I have stated, rising sharply up from the side of the great mountain, and is covered by a jungle of wild shrubs that must have been growing there since the days of the deluge.
The creepers with gummy branches, the sharp serrated grass, the yellow gourd vines, the wild tendrils and plants of which we knew neither the names nor the nature, were there interwoven as closely as a herring net, to the depth of seven or eight feet from their roots.
Amid this jungle the hum of the myriads of great insects which we roused and dislodged was deafening; while the black clouds of gadflies and cockroaches were very bewildering, and, to say the least, annoying.