f
doing other work.

Jack Meredith was at his side always. By day he walked near him as he
piloted the column through the trackless forest. At night he slept
in the same tent, stretched across the doorway. Despite the enormous
fatigue, he slept the light sleep of the townsman, and often he was
awakened by Durnovo talking aloud, groaning, tossing on his narrow bed.

When they had been on the march for two months--piloted with
marvellous instinct by Durnovo--Meredith made one or two changes in the
organisation. The caravan naturally moved slowly, owing to the enormous
amount of baggage to be carried, and this delay seemed to irritate
Victor Durnovo to such an extent that at last it was obvious that the
man would go mad unless this enormous tension could be relieved.

"For God's sake," he would shout, "hurry those men on! We haven't done
ten miles to-day. Another man down--damn him!"

And more than once he had to be dragged forcibly away from the fallen
porter, whom he battered with both fists. Had he had his will, he would
have allowed no time for meals, and only a few hours' halt for rest.
Guy Oscard did not understand it. His denser nerves were incapable of
comprehending the state of irritation and unreasoning restlessness into
which the climate and excitement had brought Durnovo. But Meredith,
in his finer organisation, understood the case better. He it was who
soothingly explained the necessity for giving the men a longer rest.
He alone could persuade Durnovo to lie down at night and cease his
perpetual calculations. The man's hands were so unsteady that he could
hardly take the sights necessary to determine their position in this
sea-like waste. And to Jack alone did Victor Durnovo ever approach the
precincts of mutual confidence.

"I can't help it, Meredith," he said one day, with a scared look, after
a particularly violent outburst of temper. "I don't know what it is. I
sometimes think I am going mad."

And soon after that the change was made.

An advance column, commanded by Meredith and Durnovo, was selected to
push on to the Plateau, while Oscard and Joseph followed more leisurely
with the baggage and the slower travellers.

One of the strangest journeys in the vast unwritten history of
commercial advance was that made by the five men from the camp of the
main expedition across the lower slopes of a mountain range--unmarked on
any map, unnamed by any geographer--to the mysterious Simiacine Plateau.
It