re of
the savage standing there on the brink of that horrible hell-pit, gibing
at his once terrible but now vanquished foe. Verily there was an
appropriateness, a real poetic justice in the fate which had overwhelmed
this female fiend. Many a man had she doomed to this awful, this
unspeakably horrible fate, through the dictates of revenge, of intrigue,
or of sheer devilish, gratuitous savagery. They had languished and
died--some in raving mania--here in black darkness and amid horrors
unspeakable. Now the same fate had overtaken herself.

Josane paused. The groans of his victim were becoming fainter and
fainter.

"_Hau_! It is music to my ears," he muttered. Then, turning, he
deliberately blew out all the lights save the one that he carried, and
once more humming his fierce improvised song of vengeance, he sped away
through the gloom to rejoin his white companions, leaving this horrible
pit of Tophet to the grisly occupancy of its hissing, crawling serpents
and its new but fast dying human denizen.

CHAPTER FORTY SEVEN.

INTO SPACE.

"Heavens! What a glorious thing is the light of day!" exclaimed Hoste,
looking around as if he never expected to behold that blessing again,
instead of having just been restored to it.

"Let's hope that philosophical reflection will console us throughout our
impending ducking," rejoined Eustace drily. "We are going to get it in
half an hour at the outside."

Great storm clouds were rolling up beyond the Bashi Valley. The same
brooding stillness, now greatly intensified, hung in the air; broken
every now and again by fitful red flashes and the dull, heavy boom of
thunder. The far off murmur of the river rose up between its
imprisoning _krantzes_ and steep forest-clad slopes to the place where
their halt was made.

They had emerged safely to the upper air with their unfortunate and
oft-times troublesome charge. Recognising the impracticability of
conveying the latter along the perilous causeway which had taxed their
own powers so severely, they had elected to try the other way out, to
wit, the vertical shaft, beneath which they had passed shortly after
first entering the cavern, and, after a toilsome climb, by no means free
from danger, burdened as they were with the unhappy lunatic, had
regained the light of day in safety.

But their difficulties and dangers were by no means at an end. For the
first, they were a long way above the spot where they had left their