Five small hill men were climbing after them on the slopes.
“Never mind them. Put out for the top, boys,” shouted the curator, running after them. “We’ve got to get there and dig in before any flanking parties cut us off.”
They raced up over the lava-strewn slopes. The top of the mountain was a bare cone, with a deep, narrow crater, perhaps fifty feet in bore, extending down into it. A faint odor of sulphur came up from its dark depths. Around the lip was fine lava dust and small rocks. For at least fifty yards down the slopes there was no cover of any sort.
“You and Sadok stand off those beggars, Dwight. Dig in on the rim of the crater and pick ’em off. Here’s where we make our stand for the present,” ordered the curator, as he and the rest of the party ran around the crater to the south. They pawed shallow pits in the detritus and lay down, watching the slopes below. No pygmies had come in sight yet, but there was much that was interesting to study. Out of the jungle clearing on the opposite mountain, beyond them to the south, rose the smoke of a huge signal fire, and their glasses could make out huts in the trees near it. To the east, the long wall of the Great Precipice stretched southward, halving one side of the mountain ranges, with the green of the lowland jungle swarming up to its base. Near its brink was a small clearing and yet another pygmy village. It was their country, all right!
But to the southeast rose a sight that held them all breathless. The geological formation in the interior was dark and stratified, of basic instead of volcanic rock, and the ragged edges of thin coal seams could be picked out running through the jungle along bare escarpments. Before them rose sheer a truncated cone of a mountain, separated from the interior formations by a deep gap. Its whole upper half was bare of jungle, and across it, in a horizontal belt, ran a vein of deep pink, at least four hundred feet from top to bottom!
“Red Mountain!” gasped the curator, as he and Nicky stared speechless at the fabulous wealth spread out before their eyes. “Pure cinnabar—and Lord knows how many million tons of it! It makes that Mexican deposit look like a thirty-cent Mex. dollar when you want to buy a tin of white man’s tobacco with it! Well, while we’ve got time, the most important thing in the world to do now is to locate that mountain on the map.”
The crack of Dwight’s automatic came to their ears as the curator got out his notebook and the mess kit with his surveyor’s compass packed in one of its pans. Dwight and Sadok were already at work, they could hear, and as they opened out the map page a long cane arrow came singing over their shoulders and soared on down the slope.
“Gee! They must be getting close up on that side! Make it snappy, sir!” said Nicky, drawing his revolver and laying it on a rock beside him.
“We’ll add about three miles to the base line, from the banyan tree to this cone,” said the curator, imperturbably, drawing it in with his pencil. Then he sighted Red Mountain most carefully through the compass bars. “Distance, about seven miles in an air line, I should judge. What do you think, Nick?”
Baderoon, to their right, gave a grunt and shot his stout bow. The arrow soared down the slope and into a thick aloe clump on the edge of the jungle. A little black man rose out of it and fell over backward.