ose louder and louder.

"Quick, Dick," Mr Harvey shouted, "or you will be too late."

Dick hurried to the utmost, but the stream was already rising rapidly,
and was running knee-deep between the stones. Stumbling and slipping,
and cutting himself against the rocks, Dick struggled on. The mighty
roar was now close behind him, and seemed to him like that of a heavy
train at full speed. He reached the mouth of the ravine; the water was
already up to his waist. Mr Harvey and Jumbo dashed in, seized him by
the arms, and dragged him out.

"Run!" they said.

They were not fifty yards from the mouth, when Dick, looking round, saw
a mighty wall of water, fifteen feet high, leap from it, pouring as from
huge sluice-gates into the valley. He did not stop running until he
joined the rest gathered by the waggons.

Tom and his party were already there, for the rising water had soon
warned their assailants of the danger, and the fire had suddenly ceased.
Already the greater part of the valley was covered with water, down the
centre of which a foaming torrent was flowing. Here and there could be
seen numerous dark objects, which, he knew, were the bodies of the
Indians who had defended the upper defile, caught before they could
reach its mouth by the wall of water from above. They had instantly
been dashed lifeless against the rocks and boulders, and not one could
be seen to make towards the comparatively still waters on either side of
the centre stream.

Driven back again by the narrow entrance to the lower defile the water
in the valley rose rapidly, as with an ever-increasing violence it
poured in from above. There it was rushing out in a solid, dark-brown
cataract, which Dick judged to be fully forty feet in height. In a
quarter of an hour from its first outburst the water had already reached
the feet of those standing upon the little knoll of ground in the
valley. The oxen lowing and stamping with terror pressed more and more
closely together. The young ostriches were placed in one of the
waggons, for although their height would have left their heads well
above water, they would probably have succumbed to the effects of a
prolonged submersion of their bodies.

"If it goes on like this for another quarter of an hour," Mr Harvey
said, "the oxen will be washed away, if not the waggons. Thank God, I
think we can all manage to climb up the slope. Jumbo, tell the men each
to load themselves with five or six days' pr