"KWA 'ZINYOKA."
The brooding, oppressive stillness deepened. Not a breath of air
stirred the sprays of the bush, which slept motionless as though carved
in stone. Even the very bird voices were hushed. Far below, the sound
of the river, flowing over its long stony reaches, came upwards in
plaintive monotonous murmur.
All of a sudden Josane turned. He sent one keen searching glance
straight in front of him, and another from side to side.
"The Home of the Serpents is a horrible place," he said. "I have warned
you that it is so. It is not too late now. The _Amakosi_ can yet turn
back."
The awed solemnity of his tone could not fail to impress his hearers,
especially two of them. The boding sense of oppression in the
atmosphere, the utter wildness of the surroundings, the uneasy,
mysterious nature of their quest, and the tall gaunt figure of the old
Kafir standing in the semi-gloom beneath the funereal plumes of the
straight stemmed euphorbia, like an oracle of misfortune--all this
affected the imagination of two, at any rate, of these ordinarily
hard-headed and practical men in a fashion they could scarcely have
deemed possible. The third, however, was impervious to such influences.
There was too much involved in the material side of the undertaking.
No thought had he to spare apart from this; no scope was there for
giving free rein to his imagination.
"I think I may say we none of us have the slightest idea of turning
back!" he answered.
"Certainly not," assented the other two.
Josane looked fixedly at them for a moment. Then he said:
"It is good. Follow me--carefully, carefully. We do not want to leave
a broad spoor."
The undergrowth among the straight stiff stems of the euphorbia looked
dense and impenetrable as a wall. To the astonishment of the
spectators, the old Kafir lay flat on his stomach, lifted the dense
tangle just enough to admit the passage of his body, for all the world
as though he were lifting a heavy curtain, and slipped through.
"Come," he whispered from the other side, for he had completely
disappeared from view. "Come--as I did. But do not rend the bushes
more than is absolutely necessary."
They followed, worming their way in the same fashion about a dozen
yards. Then an ejaculation of amazement, not unmixed with alarm, broke
from the lips of Shelton, who was leading. It found an echo on those of
the other two. Their first instinct was to draw back.
They had emerged upon a narrow ledge, not of rock, or even earth; a
narrow ledge of soft, yielding, quaking moss. And it overhung what had
the appearance of a huge natural well.
It literally overhung. By peering cautiously outward they could see a
smooth perpendicular wall of red rock falling sheer and straight to a
depth of nearly two hundred feet. Three sides of the hollow--itself not
that distance in width--were similarly constituted, the fourth being a
precipitous, well-nigh perpendicular slope, with a sparse growth of
stunted bushes jotting its rugged sides. A strange, gruesome looking
hole, whose dismal depths showed not the smallest sign of life. Could
this be the awesome, mysterious "Home of the Serpents?"
But Josane's next words disabused them on this point.
"Tarry not," he said. "Follow me. Do even as I do."
Right to the brink of this horrible abyss the bush grew in a dense
jungly wall, and it was the roots of this, overgrown with an
accumulation of moss and soil, that constituted the apology for a ledge
along which they were expected to make their way. And there was a
distance of at least sixty or seventy yards of this precarious footway,
to miss which would mean a certain and terrible death.
It would have been something of an ordeal even had the foothold been
firm. Now, however, as they made their way along this quivering,
quaking, ladder-like pathway of projecting roots interleaved with
treacherous moss, not one of the three was altogether free from a
nervous and shaky sensation about the knees as he moved slowly forward,
selecting the strongest-looking stems for hand-hold. Once a root
whereon Hoste had put his foot gave way with a muffled crack, letting
his leg through the fearful pathway up to the thigh. An involuntary cry
escaped him as, grasping a stem above him, he drew it forth with a
supreme effort, and his brown visage assumed a hue a good many shades
paler, as through the hole thus made he contemplated a little cloud of
leaves and sticks swirling away into the abyss.
"Great Heaven!" he ejaculated. "Are we never coming to the end of this
ghastly place?"
"How would you like to cross it running at full speed, like a monkey, as
I was forced to do? I told you I had to fly through the air," muttered
Josane, who had overheard. "The horror of it has only just begun--just
begun. _Hau_! Did I not say it was going to be a horrible place?"
But they were destined to reach the end of it without mishap, and right
glad were they to find themselves crawling along a narrow ledge overhung
by a great rock, still skirting the abyss, but at any rate there was
hard ground under them; not a mere shaky network of more or less rotten
roots.
"Is this the only way, Josane?" said Eustace at length, as they paused
for a few minutes to recover breath, and, truth to say, to steady their
nerves a trifle. Even he put the question with some diffidence, for as
they drew nearer and nearer to the locality of their weird quest the old
Gcaleka's manner had undergone a still further change. He had become
morose and taciturn, gloomy and abstracted to a degree.
"It is not," he answered. "It is the only way I know. When I came here
my eyes were shut; when I went away they were open. Then I approached
it from above; now we have approached from below. The way by which I
left, is the way you have seen."
"O Lord! I wouldn't travel the last infernal hundred yards again for a
thousand pounds," muttered Hoste ruefully. "And now, I've got to do it
again for nothing. I'd sooner run the gauntlet of the whole Gcaleka
tribe, as we did before."
"We may have to do that as well," remarked Shelton. "But I think I
never did see such an utterly dismal and God-forsaken corner in my life.
Looks as if Old Nick had built it out of sheer devilment."
There was reason in what he said. The immense funnel-like hole seemed
an extraordinary caprice of Nature. Nothing grew at the bottom but
coarse herbage and a few stunted bushes. It seemed absolutely lacking
in _raison d'etre_. Occurring at the top of a mountain, it would at
once have suggested an ancient crater. Occurring, as it did, in solid
ground on the steep slope of a lofty river bank that theory seemed not
to hold good. On all sides, save the narrow defile they had come
through, it was shut in by lofty wooded heights breaking here and there
into a red iron-stone cliff.
Their guide resumed his way, advancing in a listening attitude, and with
intense caution. The ledge upon which they crept, now on all-fours,
widened considerably. The projecting rock overhead jutted out further
and further, till it overhung the abyss for a considerable distance.
Beneath its shade they were already in semi-gloom. Crawling along,
toilsomely, laboriously, one behind the other, each man with all his
senses, all his faculties, on the alert, the fact that their guide had
stopped came upon them as a surprise. Then, as they joined him, and
crouched there side by side--each man's heart beat quicker, each man's
face slightly changed colour. For the overhanging rock had heightened--
the ledge had widened to an area of fifteen or twenty feet. Flooring
and rock-roof no longer met. At the bottom of this area, both yawned
away from each other in a black horizontal rift.
Save through this rift there was no getting any further. Quickly each
mind grasped the solution. The cave yawning in front of them was--
"Where does that hole lead to, Josane?" said Hoste.
"_Kwa 'zinyoka_," replied the Gcaleka, impressively.
Such creatures are we of the light and air, that it is safe to assert
that not even the boldest among us can undertake the most cursory
exploration into the bowels of the earth without a consciousness of ever
so slight a sobering influence, a kind of misgiving begotten of the idea
of darkness and weight--a feeling as though the cavern roof might crush
down upon us, and bury us there throughout the aeons of eternity. It is
not surprising, therefore, that our three friends--all men of tried
courage--should sit down for a few minutes, and contemplate this yawning
black hole in dubious silence.
It was no reflection on their courage, either. They had just dared and
surmounted a peril trying and frightful enough to tax the strongest
nerves--and now before them lay the entrance to an unknown _inferno_; a
place bristling with grim and mysterious terrors such as even their
stout-hearted guide--the only man who knew what they were--recoiled from
braving again. They could hardly believe that the friend and
fellow-countrymen, whom all these months they had reckoned among the
slain, lay near them within that fearful place, alive, and perchance
unharmed. It might be, however, that the cavern before them was but a
tunnel, leading to some hidden and inaccessible retreat like the curious
crater-like hollow they had just skirted.
"_Au_!" exclaimed Josane, with a dissatisfied shake of the head. "We
cannot afford to _sleep_ here. If we intend to go in we must do so at
once."
There was reason in this. Their preparations were simple enough--and
consisted in seeing that their weapons were in perfect readiness.
Eustace, too, had lighted a strong bull's-eye lantern with a closing
slide. Besides this, each man was plentifully supplied with candles,
which, however, it was decided, should only be used if a quantity of
light became absolutely necessary.
Be it remembered not one of the three white men had other than the
vaguest idea of the nature of the horrors which this gruesome place
might disclose. Whether through motives of superstition or from
whatever cause, Josane had hitherto preserved a remarkable silence on
the subject. Now he said, significantly:
"Hear my words, Amakosi. Tread one behind the other, _and look neither
to the right nor to the left, nor above. But look where you place your
steps, and look carefully_. Remember my words, for I know that of which
I speak."
They compared their watches. It was just half-past one. They sent a
last long look at the sky and the surrounding heights. As they did so
there rolled forth upon the heavy air a long, low boom of distant
thunder. Then they fell into their places and entered the cavern, the
same unspoken thought in each man's mind--Would they ever behold the
fair light of day again?
And the distant, muttering thunder peal, hoarse, heavy, sullen, breaking
upon the sultry air, at the moment when they left the outer world,
struck them as an omen--the menacing voice of outraged Nature booming
the knell of those who had the temerity to seek to penetrate her
innermost mysteries.