interfere with them, arguing
that, after all, they were not ivory hunters, and that their object was
the acquisition of new or rare trophies, rather than an indiscriminate
collection of skins, horns, tusks, and what not. Von Schalckenberg,
indeed, declared that if he could not get a unicorn he did not want
anything.

Their progress was slow, for although the sky was cloudless and studded
with stars that beamed with a clear, mellow radiance and brilliancy
unknown in the more humid atmosphere of the temperate zones, the light
that they afforded was sufficient only to reveal to the two men the
clumps of bush and other objects close at hand. Moreover the grass was
long and matted enough to demand the expenditure of a considerable
amount of exertion to force a passage through it, and the night was
close and very hot. To traverse the half-mile between the ship and the
margin of the lake cost them, therefore, nearly twenty minutes of
toilsome walking. At length, however, the professor, who, as the more
experienced hunter, was leading the way, murmured--

"Ah! there is the water at last, thank goodness! And now, my friend, we
must `go slow,' as you say, and be careful where we put our feet, or we
may stumble unawares over something that we have no desire to meet at
quite such close quarters."

The next moment the precise thing of which he had spoken happened. His
foot encountered something bulky and firm that yielded and moved at the
contact, and before the unfortunate man could utter a cry of warning
there occurred a sudden and violent rustling and switching of the long
grass in front of him, something struck him a violent blow on the
shoulder, and in an instant he found himself enveloped in the coils of
an enormous python, the great head of which towered threateningly above
him, as it opened wide its gaping jaws within a foot of his face and
emitted a loud, sibilant, angry hiss. Its hot, foetid breath struck him
full in the face and, in conjunction with the overpowering musky smell
of its body, affected him with a deadly nausea that, of itself, was
quite sufficient to rob him of all power of resistance, apart from the
fact that his arms were bound to his body so tightly by one of the
immense convolutions of the serpent's body--which it seemed to him was
nearly as thick as his own--that it was impossible to move them by even
so little as a single inch. And those deadly coils were tightening
round him, too; he could