“Cut away!”
As usual, Fritz took the lead. They descended the cone without any difficulty, and reached the foot of the range. Some happy instinct, a genuine sense of direction, had led them to take the same path as Mr. Wolston, Ernest, and Jack had taken, and it was barely eight o’clock when they reached the edge of the vast pine-forest.
And by a no less happy chance—there seemed nothing surprising in it, for they had entered upon the season of happy chances—the boatswain found the cave in which Mr. Wolston and the two brothers had taken shelter. It was rather small, but large enough for Jenny and Dolly and Susan and little Bob. The men could sleep in the open air. They could tell, from the white ashes of a fire, that the cave had been occupied before.
Perhaps all the members of the two families had crossed this forest and climbed the peak on which the British flag was waving!
After supper, when Bob had fallen asleep in a corner of the cave, they talked long, notwithstanding all the fatigue of the day, and the talk turned upon the flag.
During the week that they had been held prisoners, the ship must have sailed northwards. The only explanation of that could be the persistence of contrary winds, for it was manifestly to the interest of Robert Borupt and the crew to reach the far waters of the Pacific. If they had not done so it was because the weather had prevented them.
Everything now went to show that the Flag had been driven towards the Indian Ocean, into the proximity of New Switzerland. Reckoning the time that had passed, and the course that had been followed, since the boat had been cast adrift, the incontestable conclusion followed that on that day Harry Gould and his companions could not have been much more than a couple of hundred miles from the desired island, though they had imagined themselves separated from it by a thousand or more.
The boat had touched land on the southern coast, which Fritz and Frank did not know at all, the other side of the mountain range which they had seen for the first time when they came out into the Green Valley. Who could have dreamed that there could be such an amazing difference in the nature of the soil and its products between the rich country to the north of the range and the arid plateau which extended from the peak to the sea?
Now they could understand the arrival of the albatross on the other side of the cliff. After Jenny Montrose’s departure the bird had probably returned to Burning Rock, whence it flew sometimes to the shore of New Switzerland, though it had never gone either to Falconhurst or Rock Castle.
What a big part the faithful bird had played in their salvation! It was to him that they owed the discovery of that second cavern into which little Bob had followed him, and, as a consequence, the finding of the passage which came out on the top of the cliff.