ut for a long time, but they saw nor heard nothing of
any living creature. It would be easy enough for anybody to come back up
the ravine, but nobody came.

They had now grown so hungry that they could have almost eaten each
other. They felt they must get out of the cave and go to look for food.
It would be better to be shot than to sit there and starve.

Then they devised a plan by which they could get down. The smallest man
got out of the cave and let himself hang, holding to the outer edge of
the floor with his hands. Then another man put his feet over the edge of
the rock, and let the hanging man take hold of them. The other two each
seized an arm of the second man, and lowered the two down as far as they
could reach. When they had done this, the bottom man dropped, and did not
hurt himself. Then they had to pull up the second man, for the fall would
have been too great for him.

After that they had to wait a long time, while the man who had got out
went to look for something by which the others could help themselves
down--the ladder they had used having been carried away with everything
else. After going a good way down the ravine to a place where it grew
much wider, with the walls lower, he found things that had been thrown up
on the sides, and among these was the trunk of a young tree, which,
after a great deal of hard work, he brought back to the cave, and by the
help of this they all scrambled down.

They hurried down the ravine, and as they approached the lower part,
where it became wider before opening into the little bay into which the
stream ran, they found that the flood, as it had grown shallower and
spread itself out, had left here and there various things which it had
brought down from the camp--bits of the huts, articles of clothing, and
after a while they came to a Rackbird, quite dead, and hanging upon a
point of projecting rock. Farther on they found two or three more bodies
stranded, and later in the day some Rackbirds who had been washed out to
sea came back with the tide, and were found upon the beach. It was
impossible, Cheditafa said, for any of them to have escaped from that
raging torrent, which hurled them against the rocks as it carried them
down to the sea.

But the little party of hungry Africans did not stop to examine anything
which had been left. What they wanted was something to eat, and they
knew where to get it. About a quarter of a mile back from the beach was
the storehouse o