However, naught chanced to disturb our slumbers, and looking well to our arms, we marched briskly forward.
Lestrade was a little ahead, and on a sudden he gave a sharp cry and—disappeared. The ground had opened and swallowed him. I pressed forward, and my horrified gaze took in at a flash the devilish trap into which he had fallen.
A pit thirty feet in depth, twenty feet or more in width, stretched, as I afterwards found, from one side of the road to the other. It had been artfully covered with a fine mesh of woven grass, and this mesh by several inches of earth, so that the fiendish contrivance was hidden from the most careful gaze. Air-holes, the use of which I will tell presently, were so arranged as to be concealed by the dense foliage of the jungle. The plaited grass of course could not bear up any weight of moment, although small animals might safely venture across.
But this was not all. A loathsome mass of serpents crawled and twisted upon the bottom of this pit; and hanging by his fingers from a slight projecting rock on the side, some twelve feet down, I saw the agonized form of my friend.
“Courage, Gaston!” I cried, and cheerfully, though my soul was sick within me. “I will save you—or shoot you,” I added inwardly.
Even in that moment of horror the old mocking smile played for an instant on the white face beneath.
“Agreed,” Lestrade answered, in a voice that he fain would have copied after my own.
I slipped the woven garment of the priest Sagamoso from about my body, and knotted it into a running noose. This I tied securely to the stock of my rifle, and leaning over the pit, I swung it down in the hope that I might fasten it under Gaston’s shoulders and so ease the terrible strain that I could see grew instantly more unbearable.
I beheld the white bones of animals or men in the pit beneath. The fetid odor of that nameless place assailed my nostrils, and I saw, merciful heaven! that it should be so—the noose fell short.
I looked heavily upward, and there, carved on a tree that overtopped the pit, I beheld the horrid image of the snake-encircled god.