il his dying day.

"Oh, I can't stand any more of this," said Hoste, who was walking last.
"Hang it. Anything above ground, you know--but this--! Faugh! We've
got no show at all. Ugh-h!"

Something cold had come in contact with his hand. He started violently.
But it was only the clammy surface of a projecting rock.

And now the whole of the gloomy chamber resounded with shrill and angry
hissing, as the disturbed reptiles glided hither and thither--was alive
with waving necks and distended jaws, glimpsed shadowy on the confines
of the disk of light which shot into the remote corners of the frightful
den. Curiously enough, not one of the serpents seemed to be lying in
the pathway itself. All were on the ledges of rock which bordered it.

"Keep silence and follow close on my steps," said Josane shortly. Then
he raised his voice and threw a marvellously strange, soft melodiousness
into the weird song, which he had never ceased to chant. Eustace, who
was the first to recover to some extent his self-possession, and who
took in the state of affairs, now joined in with a low, clear, whistling
accompaniment. The effect was extraordinary. The writhing contortions
of the reptiles ceased with a suddenness little short of magical. With
heads raised and a slight waving motion of the neck they listened,
apparently entranced. It was a wonderful sight, terrible in its weird
ghastliness--that swarm of deadly serpents held thus spell-bound by the
eerie barbaric music. It really looked as though there was more than
met the eye in that heathenish adjuration as they walked unharmed
through the deadly reptiles to the refrain of the long-drawn, lugubrious
chant.

"Harm us not,
O Snake of Snakes!
Do us no hurt,
_O Inyoka 'Nkulu_!"

Thus they passed through that fearful chamber, sometimes within a
couple
of yards of two or three serpents lying on a level with their faces.
Once it was all that even Eustace, the self-possessed, could do to
keep
himself from ducking violently as the head of a huge puff-adder
noiselessly shot up horribly close to his ear, and a very marked
quaver
came into his whistling notes.

As the cavern narrowed to its former tunnel-like dimensions the
serpents
grew perceptibly scarcer. One or two would be seen to wriggle away,
here
and there; then no more were met with. The sickening closeness of the
air still continued, and now this stood amply accounted for.