“I wish they’d come out of their holes,” grumbled Patsy. “I’d rather have them sting me than stay back there, where you can’t tell what they are after. What do you think about it, chief?”
“Ask Jai Singh,” was Nick Carter’s response.
Jai Singh spoke for himself, without being questioned.
“Such is not their way,” he told them, in his deep voice. “So long as they see we keep guard, they hide away deep in the forests. Yet they watch—they watch! Look you! See you that way to the left—far away, above the big trees yonder above the sun. It looks like a pinch of wind-driven dust?”
“What is it?” asked Jefferson Arnold.
“They are forest birds, disturbed by their scouts,” replied Jai Singh impressively. “Aye, you may laugh. But my eyes are keen, and I tell you that it is so. It is a warning.”
They gazed at the snow-capped mountains some distance ahead of them, and which were hazy on that account. Nick Carter knew them for part of the great range of the Himalayas, mysterious and grim—as if they locked in their bosom the secrets of ages.
The forest land near the head of the river soon began to open out on either side into a barren plain, and the stream constantly dwindled, until it was scarcely a hundred yards across and flowed sluggishly over the shoals that gave hardly depth enough for the flat-bottomed boat to navigate.
“By all accounts, the Golden Scarab country should lie over there, beyond the mountains,” was Nick Carter’s comment. “Little is known of it, and I cannot even give it a better name than the one I have just used. But there is no doubt in my mind that it exists, and that it is such a place as Jai Singh has described.”
“I speak according to the knowledge that has come to me,” put in the tall Hindu, with dignity.