“You’ve fed us on leopard meat! It’s–it’s disgusting!”
“I found it filling. How about you, Miss Jenny?”
Miss Leslie did not know whether to laugh or to give way to a feeling of nausea. She did neither.
“Can we not find the spring of which you spoke?” she asked. “I am thirsty.”
“Well, I guess the fire is about burnt out,” assented Blake. “Come on; we’ll see.”
The cleft now had a far different aspect from what it had presented on their first visit. The largest of the trees, though scorched about the base, still stood with unwithered foliage, little harmed by the fire. But many of their small companions had been killed and partly destroyed by the heat and flames from the burning brush. In places the fire was yet smouldering.
Blake picked a path along the edge of the rill, where the moist vegetation, though scorched, had refused to burn. After the first abrupt ledge, up which Blake had to drag his companions, the ascent was easy. But as they climbed around an outjutting corner of the steep right wall of the cleft, Blake muttered a curse of disappointment. He could now see that the cleft did not run to the top of the cliff, but through it, like a tiny box canyon. The sides rose sheer and smooth as walls. Midway, at the highest point of the cleft, the baobab towered high above the ridge crest, its gigantic trunk filling a third of the breadth of the little gorge. Unfortunately it stood close to the left wall.
“Here’s luck for you!” growled Blake. “Why couldn’t the blamed old tree have grown on the other side? We might have found a way to climb it. Guess we’ll have to smoke out another leopard. We’re no nearer those birds’ nests than we were yesterday.”
“By Jove, look here!” exclaimed Winthrope. “This is our chance for antelope! Here by the spring are bamboos–real bamboos,–and only half the thicket burned.”
“What of them?” demanded Blake.