stin calmly. "You'll find all about it in the Bible if
you will only take the trouble to read. Why do you talk such rubbish
about gases?"

"Because only gas, or something of the sort, could have made us imagine
them."

"Nonsense, Bickley! Those people were here right enough. Didn't they eat
our fruit and drink the water I brought them without ever saying thank
you? Only, they are not human. They are evil spirits, and for my part
I don't want to see any more of them, though I have no doubt Arbuthnot
does, as that Glittering Lady threw her arms round his neck when she
woke up, and already he is calling her by her Christian name, if the
word Christian can be used in connection with her. The old fellow had
the impudence to tell us that he was a god, and it is remarkable that
he should have called himself Oro, seeing that the devil they worship on
the island is also called Oro and the place itself is named Orofena."

"As to where they have gone," continued Bickley, taking no notice of
Bastin, "I really don't know. My expectation is, however, that when
we go to look tomorrow morning--and I suggest that we should not do so
before then in order that we may give our minds time to clear--we shall
find that sepulchre place quite empty, even perhaps without the crystal
coffins we have imagined to stand there."

"Perhaps we shall find that there isn't a cave at all and that we are
not sitting on a flat rock outside of it," suggested Bastin with heavy
sarcasm, adding, "You are clever in your way, Bickley, but you can talk
more rubbish than any man I ever knew."

"They told us they would come back tonight or tomorrow," I said. "If
they do, what will you say then, Bickley?"

"I will wait till they come to answer that question. Now let us go for
a walk and try to change our thoughts. We are all over-strained and
scarcely know what we are saying."

"One more question," I said as we rose to start. "Did Tommy suffer from
hallucinations as well as ourselves?"

"Why not?" answered Bickley. "He is an animal just as we are, or perhaps
we thought we saw Tommy do the things he did."

"When you found that basket of fruit, Bastin, which the natives brought
over in the canoe, was there a bough covered with red flowers lying on
the top of it?"

"Yes, Arbuthnot, one bough only; I threw it down on the rock as it got
in the way when I was carrying the basket."

"Which flowering bough we all thought we saw the Sleeper Oro carry away
after