xcellent meal.

CHAPTER VI.

THE ZU.

Our course was now through a series of cross streams, and finally we
emerged into a long, perfectly straight, and perfectly tranquil expanse
of water, bordered by a path which had every appearance of having been
made by the hand of man.

Night fell: a strange, murky night, smelling of lucifer matches, and
lit on the eastern horizon by a mysterious light, flaring like a dreary
dawn.

Our passage was obstructed by a thousand obstacles, and at one point we
plunged into the very bowels of the earth for a distance of at least a
quarter of a mile. Next we found the canal barred by a grinning row of
black iron teeth, under which we dived as best we might. We were now,
Ustani whispered to us, within the strange and dreaded region known to
the superstitious natives as _the Zu_. For the first time in our
expedition we heard the roaring of innumerable wild beasts. The
rattling trumpet of the elephant, the drum of the gorilla, the scream
of the lion, the chattering of countless apes, the yells of myriads of
cockatoos, the growls of bears, the sobs of walri,[18] the whistle of
rhinocerotes, combined to make a strange pandemonium--strange, I call
it, because the zoological learning I had picked up while with Nora at
Oxford, informed me at once that the variety of roars, screams, grunts,
skreeks, whirrings, which our footsteps seemed to awake in every kind
of animal, bird, and insect, could be paralleled only in the pages of
the 'Swiss Family Robinson.' Add to this, that it was _night_, yet dark
as a day on the London flags when the fog creeps silently about your
feet and, rising from utter blackness, grows white and whiter in its
ascent, till it coils round your neck, a white choker!

[18]
Is this plural correct?--PUBLISHER.

I can't find walrus in the Latin dictionary nor anything else
beginning with W somehow, but it _seems_ all right.--ED.

Yes, the fog was playing a dark game, but Nora could see it and go one
lighter (there were several on the stream we had quitted). She produced
a patent electric light.[19] Aided by this, we looked about us and saw
the strange denizens of the Zu.

[19]
Patent in the first sense of the word. She has not yet
received offers advantageous enough to close with in the other
sense.

It was now that the presence of mind of Leonora saved us. Foreseeing
the probability of an encounter with wild bea