In the meantime Johnny was making the best of his way up the mountain. Now he was two miles away, now only one. And now, as he paused once more at the top of a steep climb he caught an odd confusion of noises. His guide too heard and at once became violently excited. He began dancing about and howling in a strange manner.
“What’s happened?” the boy asked, after he had seized him and forced him into silence.
To this question the native made no reply.
“No use asking more,” the boy told himself. “He doesn’t understand a word of English.”
Immediately, upon being released, the fellow renewed his howling and dancing. In this manner he danced himself quite out of sight. That was the last seen of him.
But Johnny no longer needed a guide. The way was plain, straight ahead and up—up—up. He needed someone to explain the loud tum—tum—tum of drums, the wild screeching and screaming that came to him.
“The son of the bearer of the Magic Telescope is dead,” he told himself. “And this is the funeral chant. Or perhaps a witch doctor has arrived, some Papa Lou who is trying out his incantations.”
Coming at last upon a clump of tropical pines that shut the traveler off from a view of the cave’s mouth, he drew a long breath, stepped boldly forward, then stopped still to stare.
Before the cave, grotesquely lighted up by wavering torches, was the wildest, most terrible assembly of faces he had ever looked upon.
“It—it’s like a moving picture scene taken from the Hunchback of Notre Dame,” he told himself. “How terrible they are! And how they howl. What can it all mean?”