“You answered that with your revolver, Nick!” chuckled the curator. “No man can drop forty feet to that talus and live. Of course they may bring up more ropes, in time, but my idea is that all that’s left of them, with perhaps a party of fighting men from this village ahead, are now hot-footing it for some pass that they know of to the north. We’ll be on Red Mountain and giving them the laugh while they are looking for us up near the lagoon—and let’s hope they fall in with a war party of the Outanatas while they are about it! Here comes the rain, men,” he broke off. “We’ll make camp and cook something and get a bit of sleep until the moon comes up.”
They chose a spot well hidden in the jungle and the tent flies were spread on poles. A monumental feed was cooked, between Nicky’s alcohol burner and a small fire well hidden in the rocks under the tents, while the rain came down in its usual torrential downpour. Then they all turned in for some much-needed sleep. By nine o’clock the rain had stopped and a faint light over the jungle promised moonlight through the thinning clouds. The party was roused out and they broke camp, Nicky and Sadok, who were stiff and sore, being rubbed down with arnica by the curator before setting out. With the tent flies wrapped around them, the three whites set out through the wet jungle, with Sadok and Baderoon, whose naked skins seemed to revel in the raindrops, leading on ahead.
In an hour they had reached the banks of a small, swift stream, the headwaters of some river that emptied into the sea fifty miles away. Alligators, water snakes, and giant frogs plopped into its eddying depths as they came up. The splash and gurgle of waterfalls came from up the slope. Pushing along carefully, on the lookout for pythons and snakes of lesser degree, they climbed up along its banks. Steeper and more rocky became the gorge through which it defiled. Then rocky ledges of black basalt hemmed them in on both sides, and out of the gap cascaded a foaming waterfall.
In the weird moonlight, with the black shadows almost solid to the touch, it seemed to Nicky and Dwight that that was the most perilous climb they had ever ventured upon. Baderoon was quaking with fear and hanging back reluctantly, for he was no hill man, but the curator and the intrepid Sadok led on upward, pioneering out the way and hauling them up the steeper ledges by a tent fly let down for a rope. Higher and higher they climbed, the jungle falling away below almost vertically, while towering above them rose the walls of the gorge for thousands of feet. It seemed good to be at last buried deep in the cleft, with visions of the awful fate that would befall them below, if any slipped, hid mercifully from sight.
The stream came down in a series of cascades, varied by steep stretches where it sluiced along through deep channels in the rock. At one place they came to a veritable waterwheel where the whole torrent raced down a slope into a shallow basin scooped out of the solid basalt, and it shot up in a roaring pinwheel of water through which not even Sadok’s sumpitan could be driven.
Above it the walls of the gorge closed in to a narrow cleft, with high, vertical sides. There was no getting past, on either side!
“Case of swim!” ejaculated the curator, as they all stopped and looked in at the deep pool filling the cleft from wall to wall like a black ribbon. “Get out your flashers, boys. There’s one grain of comfort in it, anyway—no one would ever dream that we’d come up this way!”
They undressed and did up the bundles in the tent flies.
“Glory be to Mike, there are no anacondas in New Guinea!” shivered Nicky, looking at the black pool and thinking of former Guiana jungle days.
Still, it took courage to negotiate that pool! They scanned every inch of the wall for snakes and then plunged in, close together for mutual protection, the flashlights tied atop the boys’ heads with their bandannas, and the packs strapped on their shoulders. It seemed that that pool would never end! Its narrow ribbon of still water wound on and on through the cleft, with here and there a ledge or a rock shelf over which the water tumbled in a silent spillway, and where they could get out and rest. From ahead came, louder and louder, the roar of a waterfall. The curator listened uneasily. Such a cascade would be a catastrophe, for, if there was no way around it, by no possibility could they get up farther.