at the top.

Our delay at the Ketosh village had greatly reduced our food supplies
for the porters, and there was only enough left to last six days. In
that time we should have to ascend the mountain and descend to some
place where food supplies could be procured. It all looked quite
quixotic. We bought two bullocks, a sheep, and a goat, and, with our
guides ahead, our entire _safari_ of over a hundred souls turned toward
the grim heights that shot up before us.

[Drawing: _Up to the Rim of the Crater_]

The trail for the first thousand feet of ascent was steep and hard to
climb. The rocks high above us were specked with natives, who gazed down
in wonder at the strange spectacle. These were the cave-dwellers. After
an hour or more we reached the crest of the rim and then continued
through elephant grass ten feet high, then dense forest, and finally
through miles of clean, cool, shadowy bamboos--always steadily climbing.
The trail was fairly good and our progress was encouraging.

[Photograph: In the Belt of Bamboo]

[Photograph: Giant Cactus Growth In the Crater]

[Photograph: Up Twelve Thousand Feet in the Crater]

There were many elephant pits in the bamboo forest, but they were all
ancient ones, half-filled with decayed leaves and obviously unused for
half a century or more. From some of them fairly large-sized trees had
grown. Sometimes in the midst of these great, silent, light-green
forests we came upon giant trees, tangled and gnarled, with trunks
twenty or thirty feet in circumference. In vain we looked for the
impassable trail the natives had warned us to expect.

Late in the afternoon we came to a wonderful cave, over the mouth of
which a wonderful fan-shaped waterfall dropped seventy feet or more. My
aneroid barometer indicated an elevation of eighty-two hundred feet,
showing that we had climbed twenty-seven hundred feet since morning. We
found a little clearing in the bamboo forest and pitched our tents on
ground that sloped down like the roof of a house. The clearing was
barely fifty yards long, yet our twenty or more tents were pitched, our
horses tethered in the middle, and the camp-fires crackled merrily as
the chill air of night came down upon us. From the forest came the
multitude of sounds that told of strange birds and animals that were out
on their nocturnal hunt for food.

Early in the morning the _safari_ was sent on with the guides while we
remained to explore the cave. It was an immen