farthest corner of the cabin,
peeping out from behind one of the hammocks, as meek as a kitten, his
tail crooking uneasily. But finding that the strange noises did him no
harm, he presently came out and took up a position where he could look
through the glass-floor window at the fleeting country below.

It seemed only a few minutes before, rising higher, they shot over the
ragged chain of the Kong Mountains in western Senegambia, passing
within sight of Mount Loma's bare peak. Then, dropping again until
they were not more than a thousand feet high, they flew along over the
tablelands to the eastward, recognized the Joliba River as it lay a
yellow, twisting band below them, and a little later crossed the
southern end of the district of Bambarra.

Great forests and jungles and canebrakes swept past them. In those
tangles of gnarled trees, matted vines, interlacing rank grasses, and
clusters of towering plants, so dank with the odor of wet and decay
that the air even up where the flyers were seemed charged with it,
lurked many a monster reptile and ferocious beast. Often the four boys
saw the majestic form of a lion or the lumbering shape of an elephant
as these animals were quenching their thirst at some open spot along a
stream. And once they caught a brief glimpse of a terrific combat
between what seemed to be two enormous rhinos, which had met in a
little glen in the midst of a cluster of mahogany trees. How they
would have liked to see the finish of this battle royal! Indeed, they
would have enjoyed nothing better than to land in some favored spot and
do a little big-game hunting with their rifles!

If they had been ahead of their adversaries instead of behind, they
might have indulged in such sport, they thought. But now it would be
unwise to waste a moment. They must make every endeavor to reach their
next airport, Kuka, by nightfall. This small town was on the western
bank of the salty Lake Chad, in the very heart of Africa, and on the
southern border of the great Sahara Desert. It possessed no railroads
or telegraph service, being linked with the outside world only by
caravan route, and its inhabitants were practically all half-civilized
negroes of the Fulbee tribe, who retained all of their forefathers'
superstitions and wore no garb over their frescoed black bodies except
a short gikki or skirt.

Mr. Giddings and Mr. Wrenn had had great difficulty in getting an
English-speaking man to set up a fi