This roaring, which he had so often heard in his infancy, the old black had just recognized it.
"The lion!" he repeated.
Dick Sand, incapable of controlling himself longer, rushed, cutlass in hand, to the place occupied by Harris.
Harris was no longer there, and his horse had disappeared with him.
A sort of revelation took place in Dick Sand's mind. He was not where he had believed he was!
So it was not on the American coast that the "Pilgrim" had gone ashore! It was not the Isle of Paques, whose bearing the novice had taken at sea, but some other island situated exactly to the west of this continent, as the Isle of Paques is situated to the west of America.
The compass had deceived him during a part of the voyage, we know why! Led away by the tempest over a false route, he must have doubled Cape Horn, and from the Pacific Ocean he had passed into the Atlantic! The speed of his ship, which he could only imperfectly estimate, had been doubled, unknown to him, by the force of the hurricane!
Behold why the caoutchouc trees, the quinquinas, the products of South
America were missing in this country, which was neither the plateau of
Atacama nor the Bolivian pampa!
Yes, they were giraffes, not ostriches, which had fled away in the opening! They were elephants that had crossed the thick underwood! They were hippopotami whose repose Dick Sand had troubled under the large plants! It was the tsetse, that dipter picked up by Benedict, the formidable tsetse under whose stings the animals of the caravans perish!
Finally, it was, indeed, the roaring of the lion that had just sounded through the forest! And those forks, those chains, that knife of singular form, they were the tools of the slave-trader! Those mutilated hands, they were the hands of captives!