ther and
were settling off to sleep, when there came a weird, wild calf from the
grounds without; and so dismal was it and so like the cries of men in
agony that we all sprang to our feet and stood, with every faculty
waking, to listen to the horrible outcry. For a moment no man moved, so
full of terror were those sounds; but the doctor, coming first to his
senses, strode towards the window and pulled the heavy curtain back
from it. Then, in the dazzling light, that wonderful gold-blue light
which hovered in mist-clouds about the gardens of the bungalow, I saw a
spectacle which froze my very blood. Twenty men and women, perhaps,
some of them Europeans, some natives, some dressed in seamen's dress,
some in rags, some quite naked, were dancing a wild, fantastic,
maddening dance which no foaming Dervish could have surpassed, aye, or
imitated, in his cruellest moments. Whirling round and round, extending
their arms to the sky, sometimes casting themselves headlong on the
ground, biting the earth with savage lips, tearing their flesh with
knives, one or two falling stone-dead before our very eyes, these poor
people in their delirium cried like animals, and filled the whole woods
with their melancholic wailing. For ten minutes, it may be, the fit
endured; then one by one they sank to the earth in the most fearful
contortions of limb and face and body, and, a great silence coming upon
the house, we saw them there in that cold, clear light, outposts of the
death which Ken's Island harboured.

We saw the thing, we knew its dreadful truth, yet many minutes passed
before one among us opened his lip. The spell was still on us--a spell
of dread and fear I pray that few men may know.

"The laughing fever," exclaimed the doctor, at last, letting the
curtain fall back with trembling hand. "Yes, I have heard of that
somewhere."

And then he said, pointing to the lamp upon the table:

"Three days, my friends, three days between us and that!"

CHAPTER XIII

THE STORM

You have been informed that Dr. Gray promised us three days' security
in the bungalow, and I will now tell you how it came about that we
quitted the house next morning, and set out anew upon the strangest
errand of them all.

There's an old saying among seamen that the higher the storm the deeper
the sleep, and this, may-be, is true, if you speak of a ship and of an
English crew upon her. It takes something more than a capful of wind to
blow sleep from a sailor'