With a shudder Mather knew—knew that here, in this dark prison, was the night shelter, the universal rendezvous, of the beasts he had come so far to catch. By day they hunted through the cane tangle that covered the mountainside, perfectly concealed and safe from all detection, and as night approached they convened here from all directions to take refuge from the rains which each night spilled across the land. They were gathering now, crawling, crawling with that infernal rustling sound——
“God!” he muttered. “And he said they were rare!” Full darkness came, bringing to John Mather the torture of eternal nightmare. With hands, coat, hat, he beat and crushed the furry hordes that swarmed over him. But for every one killed two more were ready to take its place; there seemed no end to their numbers. Their curved jaws clipped into him wherever his skin was exposed. Though he could see nothing in the pitchy darkness, an odour of decay told him that shreds of flesh from their victims of days before still clung to them, and the dread of blood-poisoning obsessed him. In a quiver of loathing and fear he fought on bitterly hour after hour, dropping into snatches of exhausted sleep only to struggle up again when the writhing burden on his face threatened to choke off his breath.
At last the blackness began to gray. Dawn was coming up over the mountains, and as the light strengthened, the spiders scattered, climbing the vines again to the open air and the sunshine. Singly and in battalions they went rank after rank up the stems of their living ladders. And as the last stragglers disappeared through the opening above him Mather sat with head sunk between his hands, fighting to retain a sanity that hung on the very edge of destruction.
It must have been midday before he pulled himself together enough to eat some of the emergency rations which were as much a part of his collecting outfit as his gun or butterfly net. The food helped to steady him, and presently he began moving about under the hole at the cave’s peak, trying to determine the points of the compass by the appearance of the scraps of sky he could see through the openings in the bamboo. A few minutes’ study convinced him of the hopelessness of this, for leaden clouds had blotted out the sun. So uniform was their mass that he could not even detect their own direction of movement, which, if he could have ascertained, would have served as a fairly accurate indication here in this land where the prevailing wind at the higher levels blows from the east.
“I’d better get back to my digging,” he told himself finally. “It’s the only chance, for Pedro would never find me among all those acres of cane, even if he knew enough to come this way to look. I didn’t tell him which way I was going, when I left camp.”
He groped his way into the tunnel he had started the day before and renewed his struggle with the rocks that blocked its end. He felt stronger now, and the physical work helped to shove into the background of his mind the horror that he knew the night would bring again. Perhaps he could break his way through before dark—a mere chance, but enough to add incentive to his labour.
By superhuman effort he worked out the largest rock at last, backed into the cave with it, and wriggled in again to the attack. Prying and digging with his knife, he burrowed on through earth that gave way more readily as he progressed. Sweat streamed from him unheeded; with each foot that he advanced the air in the tunnel grew warmer. A nauseating, steamy odour crept into it, so faint at first as to defy analysis, but increasing momentarily.
Presently Mather drew his hand back with an exclamation of surprise. His fingers had touched a rock so hot that it almost burned them.
“What the hell?” he growled, then lay still, thinking, his chest heaving as he gasped for breath.
Crushingly the explanation came to him: The burrow was leading into the mountain, straight forward toward those infernal caverns of molten lava and steam which underlie that whole mighty continental backbone from Cape Horn to Panama. Already he had dug far enough through the mountain’s outer shell to reach the heat that radiated from them.