ter we were in the
same region, and moreover had found old Klaas alive and hearty. John
had become proficient in the Bushman and Hottentot tongues, as his
brother had been; though where and how he had studied them I never
knew. Would he, too, I wondered, try to obtain the Proof, as his poor
mad brother had done? And when we first came in contact with the
baboons I watched him closely. But he betrayed no madness only an
intense interest in and hatred of them. Peculiarly enough, I thought at
the time, although he shot the smaller ones mercilessly I never saw him
shoot at the huge beasts we often saw watching us from the peaks. He
must have noticed me watching him, for one day he turned and looked me
full in the face, sadly and wistfully, as though reading my thoughts:
'No, no, Jason; never fear, old friend; I shall never seek the proof as
Hector did. And yet, and yet, it is there!' I soon found that all his
inquiries among the natives tended in one direction: he sought the
whereabouts of the secret place of the baboons in which they all
believed. But none could tell him, till one day in the wild and remote
region between the Great Fish River and the Tatas Mountains we came
upon Jantje, an old Hottentot, who told us that he had seen the place.
He had been hunting for honey in the almost inaccessible mountains of
that wild spot, and had one day found himself in a narrow gorge,
looking down into what appeared to be a large crater. The sides were
precipitous except at one spot where a narrow and tortuous canon made
it possible to enter. And here, he assured us, was the stronghold of
the baboons. Huge ones bigger than men, he told us and hundreds of
them. And for a new gun and some powder and shot he would take us to
the place. But he would not enter!

"Jantje got his gun; and three days later John, myself, and Klaas stood
upon a mountain-top and looked into the spot he had described. It was
at least five hundred feet deep, and perhaps a hundred yards across the
bottom, which was flat and sandy. Even as we first looked into the
place the baboons, several hundred strong, were surging through the
gorge of which Jantje had spoken, away towards their feeding-ground by
the Groot River. We watched them through our glasses. Many of them were
of a man's size, and they were not like the ordinary baboon.

"John was all excitement. 'We will wait till they are clear away, and
then we'll go down,' he said. I warned him that there were sur