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