was gone amid a swirl of leaves and branches.

"What's the matter?" shouted Roxton from below. "Anything wrong with
you?"

"Did you see it?" I cried, with my arms round the branch and all my
nerves tingling.

"We heard a row, as if your foot had slipped. What was it?"

I was so shocked at the sudden and strange appearance of this ape-man
that I hesitated whether I should not climb down again and tell my
experience to my companions. But I was already so far up the great
tree that it seemed a humiliation to return without having carried out
my mission.

After a long pause, therefore, to recover my breath and my courage, I
continued my ascent. Once I put my weight upon a rotten branch and
swung for a few seconds by my hands, but in the main it was all easy
climbing. Gradually the leaves thinned around me, and I was aware,
from the wind upon my face, that I had topped all the trees of the
forest. I was determined, however, not to look about me before I had
reached the very highest point, so I scrambled on until I had got so
far that the topmost branch was bending beneath my weight. There I
settled into a convenient fork, and, balancing myself securely, I found
myself looking down at a most wonderful panorama of this strange
country in which we found ourselves.

The sun was just above the western sky-line, and the evening was a
particularly bright and clear one, so that the whole extent of the
plateau was visible beneath me. It was, as seen from this height, of
an oval contour, with a breadth of about thirty miles and a width of
twenty. Its general shape was that of a shallow funnel, all the sides
sloping down to a considerable lake in the center. This lake may have
been ten miles in circumference, and lay very green and beautiful in
the evening light, with a thick fringe of reeds at its edges, and with
its surface broken by several yellow sandbanks, which gleamed golden in
the mellow sunshine. A number of long dark objects, which were too
large for alligators and too long for canoes, lay upon the edges of
these patches of sand. With my glass I could clearly see that they
were alive, but what their nature might be I could not imagine.

From the side of the plateau on which we were, slopes of woodland, with
occasional glades, stretched down for five or six miles to the central
lake. I could see at my very feet the glade of the iguanodons, and
farther off was a round opening in the trees which marked the s