On their triumphal return to the cliff with the tusks of the slain elephant as trophies of the hunt a strange spectacle met the boys' eyes. Clustered about a sort of altar, which they had not noticed before, was a group of the cliff-dwellers who seemed to be deeply interested in something that was going forward. A loud sound of chanting and intoning of what seemed to be a solemn ritual was the first inkling the boys had of what was going on.
On joining the throng the lads found that it was some sort of a religious ceremony that was being proceeded with. A group of men in white flowing robes and high conical hats—decorated with mystic symbols worked out in precious stones that looked like rubies and emeralds, though of such size that this seemed scarcely credible—were walking round and round the altar in a sort of what the irreverent Billy termed "a cakewalk." Pausing at each corner and revolving slowly, three times they intoned the weird chant.
Suddenly the music took on a louder tone arid several men with clashing cymbals joined in. The auditors, too, fell flat on their faces and Billy and Lathrop, on the former's suggestion, did the same.
"Not to do as the others are doing might cost us our heads," sagely remarked the diplomatic Billy, "and I need mine in my business."
Whatever the nature of the ceremony, it was now evidently approaching a climax. The chanting grew louder and more furious and the cymbal players clashed their huge metal instruments together with a deafening clangor. Suddenly, from the passage from which the galleries branched off, there appeared six men clad in robes of flaming scarlet and conical caps of the same color.
They formed an escort to a pitiable figure.
That of a white bearded man who was bent with years and whose eyes gazed vacantly about him as he stumbled along between the red-robed dignitaries. But it was not his age and not his feebleness that made the boys' hearts beat quicker and caused a galvanic shock to shoot through them.
The man was white.
There was no doubt about it. In spite of his sun-browned skin and the barbarous ornaments that covered him, the figure in the center of the red-robed group was a Caucasian—perhaps an American—a fellow countryman.
And now the boys noticed with a shudder that in the hands of each of the red-robed men was a knife of some sort of stone—perhaps flint. These cruel looking weapons they brandished as they slowly paced forward in time to the chanting.
But their captive—if he were a captive seemed indifferent to all this. His dull eyes gazed straight ahead of him as if he were hypnotized—or, as was more probable, under the influence of some drug. As the group approached the altar the chanting suddenly stopped and the onlookers rose to their feet. From the altar now arose a thin spiral of smoke, the offspring of a fire kindled by one of the priests.
The sun was just setting and showed like a blood-red ball, through the mist that arose from low-lying garden lands. As its disk touched the horizon the chanting broke out afresh and the red-robed men seizing the old white man as if he were a beast dragged him forward and threw him on the altar.
And now for the first time came to the chums the horrifying realization of what the scene they were witnessing really meant.
The man was about to be sacrificed!
But even as the red-robed men raised their knives in unison and were about to give them the downward lunge that would extinguish the life of their feeble victim—and as the other priests and the audience turning toward the setting sun, chanted louder and more vociferously—a startling interruption occurred.
"By the holy poker you're not going to kill that old man while I can prevent it."
It was Billy Barnes; his face white and his lips set in a thin line of determination.
As he spoke utterly oblivious to the fact that not one of the men could understand him—Lathrop, pale-faced also, stepped forward by his side.
And there stood the two American boys while the auditors—at first dumb with amazement—began to buzz angrily like a nest of disturbed hornets.
One of the white-robed priests gave a sharp order and once more the red-garbed executors raised their knives.
Billy quietly, though his heart was beating almost to suffocation, slipped a cartridge from the recovered bag into his Arab rifle. He leveled it at the red-robed knife wielders.
"The first man that moves I'll shoot!"
Although the words were as unintelligible to the priests and the cliff-dwellers as any that had gone before, the gesture with which Billy raised the rifle to his shoulder and covered the group was eloquent enough. And as it happened, the delay saved the old man's life; for while they hesitated the sun rushed below the horizon and the swift African night fell. A loud groan from the crowd announced that the hour for the culmination of the sacrifice had passed and that for the time being the intended victim's life was saved.
But for the boys the situation was serious enough. Powerless to resist such numbers they were seized by scores of the winged men and hustled into the passage, which was lit up by blazing torches of the same resinous wood that their guide had used on the first night that they came there. They were hurried along, their feet hardly touching the ground, till they reached one of the diverging galleries. Down this their captors shoved them till they reached a small cubical cell—windowless and without ventilation. Into this they were thrust and a huge stone door that hinged on some contrivance the boys could not understand swung to upon them with a dull bang. But a few minutes later it reopened and another prisoner was thrust in.
It was the aged captive whose life Billy had saved!
This much they saw in the momentary glare of the torches and then as the door closed the darkness—so black that you could feel it—shut down again. But Billy's reportorial curiosity, even in this situation, was still predominant.
"Who are you?" he asked eagerly of the new arrival, whose face he could not see and whose presence he could only guess at by the temporary revelation of the torch-light.
The only answer was a groan; but a few seconds later a voice that sounded strange from long disuse or unaccustomedness to the use of the English language replied:
"I have not heard a white man speak for forty years."
"What?" exclaimed the thunderstruck Billy.
"What I say is true and when you hear my name you will perhaps realize that fact. I am George Desmond the American explorer."
"The George Desmond who was lost in 1870?" cried Billy, almost choking with excitement.
"The same," was the reply in the same rusty voice, "like the sound of a long disused door swinging on its hinges," was the way Billy described it afterward in the article he wrote about the finding of George Desmond.
"But George Desmond was a man of thirty-five!" protested Billy, "when he was lost."
"And I am seventy-five," went on the sad voice in the blackness, "I was captured by the winged men in 1870. I have kept the record of the long years on a notched stick. I never expected to hear the sound of a fellow countryman's voice again."
The poor tired voice broke down, and in the darkness through which they could not see the boys heard the old man weeping.
"Great cats!" groaned Billy to Lathrop, whose hand he held so that they could be near together in the awful blackness, "forty years without seeing a white face—jumping horn-toads, what a fate!"
But the old man's soft weeping stopped presently and in a firmer voice he said:
"My wife and my sons? Can you tell me anything of them?"
As a newspaper man Billy recollected very clearly the space that had been given some five years before to the death, at a ripe old age, of the wife of George Desmond the lost explorer.
"She is dead," he said gently.
They heard the castaway sigh, and then he asked in a voice he strove to render firm, but which trembled in spite of itself:
"And my sons?"
"They are all alive and in business in New York," said Billy. "Your wife died believing to the end that you would come back. They placed her chair so that she could face the east. She died at daybreak with her eyes turned toward the sea beyond which lay Africa."
"Africa!" echoed the tired, disused voice. "Africa! it has cost me everything I had."
There was silence for some time after this. Neither of the boys wanted to intrude on the silent grief of the explorer so strangely found, though each was dying to ask him a host of questions. It was the aged man himself who broke the silence at length.
"But I am selfish," he exclaimed. "I should have thanked you before this for saving my life. The priests were determined that, as I was old and useless, my life should be offered to the Sun-god to appease a sickness that has of late carried off hundreds of the Flying Men. They are a dying race, young men. As a man of science, I predict that in five years or less there will not be a single one of the once numerous tribe alive. I have studied them closely and can predict their extinction."
"Then you have not been a prisoner always?" asked Billy.
"No, my young friend, I have not. When first I came here I was received warmly and was paid high honors. I was allowed to record my observations in writing—fortunately I carried a supply of ink and paper."
"You still have the manuscript?" gasped Billy, with the reporter's instinct to the fore.
"I have," sighed old Mr. Desmond, "in the cell that I so long called home then, the pages still lie. But I have neglected them for many years. I had no more writing materials when I used up my slender supply and I never thought to regain civilization.
"But now did you ever get here?" asked the amazed Billy.
"That is a long story," replied the captive, "but briefly told, it is as follows: In the season of 1870, as you perhaps know, my ill-fated expedition left Grand Bassam. My avowed object was to collect specimens and data for the Smithsonian Institute, but my real and secret desire was to find the tribe of Flying Men of whose existence I had heard in a fragmentary way on previous expeditions to the West Coast. I have found them—" he went on with a heavy sigh—"but at what a cost—at what a cost!"
There was silence for a few minutes and then the old voice went on, gaining in strength as he proceeded, and resumed acquaintance with words to which his tongue had been long unused.
"My expedition, as you know, was never heard of again. The reason was this. In some way the Arab slave-traders—who were thick in this district then and plied their nefarious trade almost openly—gained the belief that my expedition was a pretense for a plan of espionage on them and they attacked my camp one night and slaughtered every man in it but myself. Why they did not kill me I do not know, unless it was because of the intercession of a young Arab, a mere youth and the son of the chief. I have never forgotten his name or his kindness."
"What was his name?" asked Billy, who was deeply interested and wanted to get every detail of the extraordinary story.
"Muley-Hassan!" was the amazing reply.
"Muley-Hassan," echoed Billy, "why, he is the most cold-blooded fiend in the slave-trade to-day."
"Perhaps," answered the old man, "but he was good to me when he was a young man and I have never forgotten it."
"Well," he went on, picking up his narrative, "it was not long before retribution overtook the Arabs. One night their camp was attacked by a tribe whose village they had raided and sacked some time before and only a few of them escaped, among them must have been Muley-Hassan, though, till you told me of him, I believed him dead. The savages, seeing that I was not one of the Arab race took care of me and I fared well at their hands. But a great longing to see civilization—to clasp my wife in my arms, to see my children and America once more, was always with me, and one night I escaped from their village. I wandered half-delirious from fever and starvation for many days after that, for I lost my way in the forest, and, as I had no compass, wandered aimlessly seeking a river by which I might follow down to the coast. One night such a sharp attack of fever overtook me that I was-stricken unconscious. I gave myself up for dead before I lost my senses and only recollect awaking in this village. From that day to this, although I have repeatedly endeavored to escape I have never been able to do so. The ladder is guarded day and night,"—(this information dashed a half-formed hope in Billy's mind of escape by that way,) "and it would be suicide to attempt to penetrate the great jungles on the other side. I thought to end my days here, but I never dreamed till the other day that my life was destined to end as it would have, had it not been for your brave intervention.
"The malady of which I have spoken has devastated almost every family in the cliff and at the instigation of Agagi, the head priest—a man who has always hated my influence over his people—I was blamed by the other priests for being the cause of the affliction.
"They pretended to have a revelation from the Sun-god stating that if my life were sacrificed the curse that rested on the cliff-dwellers would be removed. Accordingly I was seized and chained and would certainly have died had it not been for you. But alas, young men, I fear you are doomed to forfeit your lives as the cost of rescuing an old man who is not long for this life in any event. I wish that you had been far away and had never had the brave impulse to risk your young lives for my worthless old one."
Now it is a remarkable thing, but Billy, who should have replied to the aged man in all sorts of high-sounding language, could find nothing to reply to this but:
"Oh, that's all right."
"I think you are the bravest boys I have ever heard of," the old man was beginning when a soft "hiss-s-st!" caused them all to turn their eyes to the direction in which they knew the door lay, and from which the sound had proceeded.
"H-s-s-s-t," came the sound again.
Did it mean a friend or an enemy?
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