"I don't think so!"

"Why?"

Oscard took his pipe from his lips.

"When Durnovo came down to Msala," he explained, "he had the sleeping
sickness on him. Where did he get it from?"

"By God!" ejaculated Jack Meredith, "I never thought of that. He got
it up at the Plateau. He left it behind him. They have got it up there
now."

"Not now--"

"What do you mean, Oscard?"

"Merely that all those fellows up there are dead. There is ninety
thousand pounds worth of Simiacine packed ready for carrying to the
coast, standing in a pile on the Plateau, and there are thirty-four dead
men keeping watch over it."

"Is it as infectious as that?"

"When it first shows itself, infectious is not the word. It is nothing
but a plague. Not one of those fellows can have escaped."

Jack Meredith sat forward and rubbed his two hands pensively over his
knees.

"So," he said, "only you and I and Joseph know where the Simiacine
Plateau is."

"That is so," answered Oscard.

"And Joseph won't go back?"

"Not if you were to give him that ninety thousand pounds worth of
stuff."

"And you will not go back?"

"Not for nine hundred thousand pounds. There is a curse on that place."

"I believe there is," said Meredith.

And such was the end of the great Simiacine Scheme--the wonder of a few
seasons. Some day, when the great Sahara is turned into an inland sea,
when steamers shall ply where sand now flies before the desert wind, the
Plateau may be found again. Some day, when Africa is cut from east to
west by a railway line, some adventurous soul will scale the height of
one of many mountains, one that seems no different from the rest and yet
is held in awe by the phantom-haunted denizens of the gloomy forest, and
there he will find a pyramid of wooden cases surrounded by bleached and
scattered bones where vultures have fed.

In the meantime the precious drug will grow scarcer day by day, and
the human race will be poorer by the loss of one of those half-matured
discoveries which have more than once in the world's history been on
the point of raising the animal called man to a higher, stronger, finer
development of brain and muscle than we can conceive of under existing
circumstances. Who can tell? Perhaps the strange solitary bush may be
found growing elsewhere--in some other continent across the ocean. The
ways of Nature are past comprehension, and no man can say who sows the
seed that crops up in strange places. The wind blow