almost seemed as if the wild, bloodshot eyes of their guide could
pierce the density of the forest where Nature had held unchecked,
untrimmed sway for countless generations. Victor Durnovo noted a
thousand indications unseen by his four companions. The journey no
longer partook of the nature of a carefully calculated progress across
a country untrodden by a white man's foot; it was a wild rush in a
straight line through unbroken forest fastness, guided by an instinct
that was stronger than knowledge. And the only Englishman in the
party--Jack Meredith--had to choose between madness and rest. He knew
enough of the human brain to be convinced that the only possible relief
to this tension was success.

Victor Durnovo would never know rest now until he reached the spot where
the Simiacine should be. If the trees were there, growing, as he said,
in solitary state and order, strangely suggestive of human handiwork,
then Victor Durnovo was saved. If no such spot was found, madness and
death could only follow.

To save his companion's reason, Meredith more than once drugged his
food; but when the land began to rise beneath their feet in tentative,
billow-like inequalities--the deposit of a glacial age--Durnovo refused
to stop for the preparation of food. Eating dry biscuits and stringy
tinned meat as they went along, the four men--three blacks and one
white--followed in the footsteps of their mad pilot.

"We're getting to the mountains--we're getting to the mountains! We
shall be there to-night! Think of that, Meredith--to-night!" he kept
repeating with a sickening monotony. And all the while he stumbled on.
The perspiration ran down his face in one continuous stream; at times he
paused to wipe it from his eyes with the back of his hands, and as these
were torn and bleeding, there were smears of blood across his cheeks.

The night fell; the moon rose, red and glorious, and the beasts of
this untrodden forest paused in their search for meat to watch with
wondering, fearless eyes that strange, unknown animal--man.

It was Durnovo who, climbing wildly, first saw the break in the trees
ahead. He gave a muffled cry of delight, and in a few minutes they were
all rushing, like men possessed, up a bare slope of broken shale.

Durnovo reached the summit first. A faint, pleasant odour was wafted
into their faces. They stood on the edge of a vast table-land melting
away in the yellow moonlight. Studded all over, like sheep in a meado