toasted before a fire
in a cavern-mouth, and eaten. Then he had run for his life, following
the shoulder of the mountain in the hope of meeting Schillingschen,
munching uncooked corn he had in a little bag, hiding and running at
intervals for a day and a night until he chanced on us. For an old man
almost sick with fear he was astonishingly little affected by the
adventure.

We took longer over the course than he had done, because he wanted to
find cannibals, and teach them, maybe, a needed lesson. Fred's theory
was that we should surprise them and pen them into a cavern,
discovering some means of talking with them when hunger brought them
out to surrender and cringe.

So we threw out a line of scouts, and pounced on cave-mouths suddenly,
entering great tunnels and following the course of them in ages-old
lava until sometimes we thought ourselves lost in the gloom and spent
hours finding the way out again.

Time and again we found bones--bones of wild animals, and of birds, and
of fish; now and then bones that perhaps had been monkeys, but that
looked too suspiciously like those of the fat babies mothers mourned
for in the villages below for the benefit of the doubt to be conceded
without something more or less resembling proof. But never a human
being did we see until we rounded the northeastern hump of the mountain
in a bitter wind, and spied half a hundred naked men and women, thinner
than wraiths, who scampered off at sight of us and volleyed ridiculous
arrows from a cave-mouth. The arrows fell about midway between us and
them, but threw Hassan into a paroxysm of fear, out of which it was
difficult to shake him.

"Those are the people who ate my men! That is the cavern where Tippoo
Tib hid the ivory! That is where my men's bones are! See--they have
torn my tent for clothing for their naked women!"

We put Hassan under double guard for fear lest he bolt again and leave
us. And all that day, and all the next we hunted for cannibals through
mazy caverns that seemed to extend into the mountain's very womb.
There were times when the stench was so horrible we nearly fainted. We
stumbled on men's bones. We collided with sharp projections in the
gloom--fell down holes that might have been bottomless for aught we
knew in advance--and scrambled over ledges that in places were smooth
with the wear of feet for ages. Everlastingly to right, or left of us,
or up above, or down below we could hear the inhabitants