"A lion! a lion!" he shouted.
In vain Dick tried to repress him; but he repeated,-
"A lion! a lion!"
Dick Sands seized his cutlass, and, unable any longer to control his wrath, he rushed to the spot where he had left Harris lying.
The man was gone, and his horse with him!
All the suspicions that had been so long pent up within Dick's mind now shaped themselves into actual reality. A flood of light had broken in upon him. Now he was convinced, only too certainly, that it was not the coast of America at all upon which the schooner had been cast ashore! it was not Easter Island that had been sighted far away in the west! the compass had completely deceived him; he was satisfied now that the strong currents had carried them quite round Cape Horn, and that they had really entered the Atlantic. No wonder that quinquinas, caoutchouc, and other South American products, had failed to be seen. This was neither the Bolivian pampas nor the plateau of Atacama. They were giraffes, not ostriches, that had vanished down the glade; they were elephants that had trodden down the underwood; they were hippopotamuses that were lurking by the river; it was indeed the dreaded tzetsy that Cousin Benedict had so triumphantly discovered; and, last of all, it was a lion's roar that had disturbed the silence of the forest. That chain, that knife, those forks, were unquestionably the instruments of slave-dealers; and what could those mutilated hands be, except the relics of their ill-fated victims?
Harris and Negoro must be in a conspiracy!
It was with terrible anguish that Dick gnashed his teeth and muttered,-
"Yes, it is too true; we are in Africa! in equatorial Africa! in the land of slavery! in the very haunt of slave-drivers!"