preparation for a possible attack.
Nothing came, however, and with the dawn we pushed upon our way, the
drum-beating dying out behind us. About three o'clock in the afternoon
we came to a very steep rapid, more than a mile long--the very one in
which Professor Challenger had suffered disaster upon his first
journey. I confess that the sight of it consoled me, for it was really
the first direct corroboration, slight as it was, of the truth of his
story. The Indians carried first our canoes and then our stores
through the brushwood, which is very thick at this point, while we four
whites, our rifles on our shoulders, walked between them and any danger
coming from the woods. Before evening we had successfully passed the
rapids, and made our way some ten miles above them, where we anchored
for the night. At this point I reckoned that we had come not less than
a hundred miles up the tributary from the main stream.

It was in the early forenoon of the next day that we made the great
departure. Since dawn Professor Challenger had been acutely uneasy,
continually scanning each bank of the river. Suddenly he gave an
exclamation of satisfaction and pointed to a single tree, which
projected at a peculiar angle over the side of the stream.

"What do you make of that?" he asked.

"It is surely an Assai palm," said Summerlee.

"Exactly. It was an Assai palm which I took for my landmark. The
secret opening is half a mile onwards upon the other side of the river.
There is no break in the trees. That is the wonder and the mystery of
it. There where you see light-green rushes instead of dark-green
undergrowth, there between the great cotton woods, that is my private
gate into the unknown. Push through, and you will understand."

It was indeed a wonderful place. Having reached the spot marked by a
line of light-green rushes, we poled out two canoes through them for
some hundreds of yards, and eventually emerged into a placid and
shallow stream, running clear and transparent over a sandy bottom. It
may have been twenty yards across, and was banked in on each side by
most luxuriant vegetation. No one who had not observed that for a
short distance reeds had taken the place of shrubs, could possibly have
guessed the existence of such a stream or dreamed of the fairyland
beyond.

For a fairyland it was--the most wonderful that the imagination of man
could conceive. The thick vegetation met overhead, interlacing into a
na