Chapter Six.
Richard Grenville, his Mark.
The daylight, however, told our friends nothing very new, only Kenyon hinted to Leigh that where the rocks below them levelled down to, and impinged upon, the veldt, everything was most suspiciously green and verdant, from which he inferred the presence of their old enemy, the marsh, in the immediate vicinity; then, turning round to examine the opposite cliff, his eye was caught by what seemed to be a curious kind of diagram engraved upon the face of the rock, perhaps two or three yards from the upper edge of one of its platforms, and scarce fifty feet away from them across the intervening chasm. The appearance it presented was as undernoted, the characters being some eighteen to twenty inches in length, and cut deeply into the soft sandstone with some apparently blunt instrument.
“Now,” said Kenyon, calling his companion’s attention to this, “what the deuce does yonder curious hieroglyphic signify? I’ve no knowledge of Arabic, but I think I’m right in saying that those signs belong to the calligraphy of no known language. To my professional eye they rather resemble a rough gibbet with three bodies hanging from it.”
It so happened that, as soon as daylight had satisfied the pair that their foes were not hanging about in the immediate vicinity, Leigh had quietly laid himself down to enjoy a comfortable smoke, and was at the moment in question lying on the broad of his back, gazing at the wide vista of country below him, and puffing away in perfect tranquillity, with the apex of his skull pointing towards the chasm. To save himself the trouble of rising, he lazily elevated his chin, and performed the interesting occupation of looking, so to speak, over the top of his own head, and then electrified Kenyon by bounding to his feet with a wild hurrah, and shaking hands with him enthusiastically. “Found!” he fairly yelled. “Found, as sure as there is a heaven above us!”
“Why, confound it, old fellow,” said Kenyon, ruefully nursing his bruised fingers, “whatever is the matter with you?”
“Matter!” was the reply. “Why, your hieroglyphic is as good as my cousin looking me in the face from yonder splendid rock. The solution of your mystery is a simple matter to me—a man, hanging head-downwards from yonder cliff, laboriously graved those curious characters, upside down, as we see them, upon the face of the rock, and the hand that wrote them was the hand of Grenville.”