Bomba the jungle boy at the giant cataract

by Roy Rockwood

The place looked changed to him now. It was not so weird nor mysterious now that the torches had flickered out and dawn had replaced the shadows of the night.

If Bomba had expected to find Sobrinini there, he was disappointed. The great bare hall was deserted, and though he stopped and listened intently, there was no sign of life anywhere.

Then suddenly there came to him from a distance the sound of singing. First Sobrinini’s voice—he could not be mistaken in it now—then other voices joining in a sort of weird chant that chilled the lad’s blood yet drew him irresistibly toward the point from which the sound was coming.

Slowly he emerged from the building and found himself enveloped in a swirling, gray mist.

Yet the sound of the chant served him as a guide, and he went on and on, now coming closer to the singers, then seeming to draw away from them as the voices receded.

At last, when he was beginning to think that Sobrinini had again laid a spell on him and that the voices were ghostly voices, to be heard by none but himself, he saw a dark form emerge from the mist and after it another and another.

Bomba stood still and watched. The natives were dancing, flinging their arms about wildly and intoning their weird chant, now harsh and loud, now soft like the sighing of the wind through the trees.

It was like a dance of ghosts, and it was not alone the chill damp of the air that struck cold to Bomba’s heart. He felt as though he were in some other world, and that an evil one. He had never longed for the warmth and brightness of the jungle sun as he did at that moment.

But as the natives danced on, as tireless apparently as the ghosts that Bomba half-thought them, the mist began to clear and the sun struck through, causing the moisture upon the dark bodies of the dancers to glisten.

Then, in the center of the ring, Bomba beheld Sobrinini, whirling wildly in a mad dance, long, gray locks streaming about her, and in each upflung hand the head of a great snake, while the bodies of the reptiles coiled about her arms and neck.