lipping from his
hand when Lakalatcha flamed with redoubled fury. It was as if the
mountain had suddenly bared its fiery heart to the heavens, and a
muffled detonation reached my ears.

Farquharson straightened up with a jerk and scanned the smoking peak,
from which a new trickle of white-hot lava had broken forth in a
threadlike waterfall. He watched its graceful play as if hypnotized, and
began babbling to himself in an incoherent prattle. All his faculties
seemed suddenly awake, but riveted solely upon the heavy laboring of the
mountain. He was chiding it in Malay as if it were a fractious child.
When I ventured to urge him back to shore he made no protest, but
followed me into the boat. As I pushed off and took up the oars he had
eyes for nothing but the flaming cone, as if its leaping fires held for
him an Apocalyptic vision.

I strained at the oars as if in a race, with all eternity at stake,
blindly urging the boat ahead through water that flashed crimson at
every stroke. The mountain now flamed like a beacon, and I rowed for
dear life over a sea of blood.

Farquharson sat entranced before the spectacle, chanting to himself a
kind of insane ritual, like a Parsee fire-worshiper making obeisance
before his god. He was rapt away to some plane of mystic exaltation, to
some hinterland of the soul that merged upon madness. When at length the
boat crunched upon the sandy shore he got up unsteadily from the stern
and pointed to the pharos that flamed in the heavens.

"The fire upon the altar is lit," he addressed me, oracularly, while the
fanatic light of a devotee burned in his eyes. "Shall we ascend and
prepare the sacrifice?"

I leaned over the oars, panting from my exertions, indifferent to his
rhapsody.

"If you'll take my advice, you'll get back at once to your bungalow and
strip off that wet sleeping-suit," I bluntly counseled him, but I might
as well have argued with a man in a trance.

He leaped over the gunwale and strode up the beach. Again he struck his
priestlike attitude and invoked me to follow.

"The fire upon the altar waits," he repeated, solemnly. Suddenly he
broke into a shrill laugh and ran like a deer in the direction of the
forest that stretched up the slopes of the mountain.

The mate's face, thrust over the rail as I drew alongside the schooner,
plainly bespoke his utter bewilderment. He must have though me bereft of
my senses to be paddling about at that hour of the night. The tide ha