We made the best of our way to the spot, and found, sure enough, that the hole was the mouth of a cave, no doubt the same as that of which Da Silvestra wrote. We were none too soon, for just as we reached shelter the sun went down with startling rapidity, leaving the whole place nearly dark. In these latitudes there is but little twilight. We crept into the cave, which did not appear to be very big, and, huddling ourselves together for warmth, swallowed what remained of our brandy--barely a mouthful each---and tried to forget our miseries in sleep. But this the cold was too intense to allow us to do. I am convinced that at that great altitude the thermometer cannot have been less than fourteen or fifteen degrees below freezing-point. What this meant to us, enervated as we were by hardship, want of food, and the great heat of the desert, my reader can imagine better than I can describe. Suffice it to say that it was something as near death from exposure as I have ever felt. There we sat hour after hour through the bitter night, feeling the frost wander round and nip us now in the finger, now in the foot, and now in the face. In vain did we huddle up closer and closer; there was no warmth in our miserable, starved carcasses. Sometimes one of us would drop into an uneasy slumber for a few minutes, but we could not sleep long, and perhaps it was fortunate, for I doubt if we should ever have woke again. I believe it was only by force of will that we kept ourselves alive at all.
Not very long before dawn I heard the Hottentot Ventvo"gel, whose teeth had been chattering all night like castanets, give a deep sigh, and then his teeth stopped chattering. I did not think anything of it at the time, concluding that he had gone to sleep. His back was resting against mine, and it seemed to grow colder, and colder, till at last it was like ice.
At length the air began to grow gray with light, then swift golden arrows came flashing across the snow, and at last the glorious sun peeped up above the lava wall and looked in upon our half-frozen forms and upon Ventvo"gel, sitting there among us stone dead. No wonder his back had felt cold, poor fellow. He had died when I heard him sigh, and was now almost frozen stiff. Shocked beyond measure, we dragged ourselves from the corpse (strange the horror we all have of the companionship of a dead body), and left it still sitting there, with its arms clasped round its knees.
By this time the sunlight was pouring its cold rays (for here they were cold) straight in at the mouth of the cave. Suddenly I heard an exclamation of fear from some one, and turned my head down the cave.
And this was what I saw. Sitting at the end of it, for it was not more than twenty feet long, was another form, of which the head rested on the chest and the long arms hung down. I stared at it, and saw that it, too, was a _i_ dead man _i_, and what was more, a white man.
The others saw it, too, and the sight proved too much for our shattered nerves. One and all we scrambled out of the cave as fast as our half-frozen limbs would allow.
Outside the cave we halted, feeling rather foolish.
"I am going back," said Sir Henry. "Why?" asked Good. "Because it has struck me that--what we saw--may be my brother."
This was a new idea, and we reentered the cave to put it to the proof, After the bright light outside our eyes, weak as they were with stating at the snow, could not for a while pierce the gloom of the cave. Presently, however, we grew accustomed to the semi-darkness, and advanced on to the dead form.
Sir Henry knelt down and peered into its face.
"Thank God," he said, with a sigh of relief, "it is not my brother."
Then I went and looked. The corpse was that of a tall man in middle life, with aquiline features, grizzled hair, and a long black mustache. The skin was perfectly yellow, and stretched tightly over the bones. Its clothing, with the exception of what seemed to be the remains of a pair of woollen hose, had been removed, leaving the skeleton-like frame naked. Round the neck hung a yellow ivory crucifix. The corpse was frozen perfectly stiff.
"Who on earth can it be?" said I.
"Can't you guess?" asked Good.
I shook my head.
"Why, the old don, Jose' da Silvestra, of course--who else?"
"Impossible," I gasped, "he died three hundred years ago."
"And what is there to prevent his lasting for three thousand years in this atmosphere I should like to know?" asked Good. "If only the air is cold enough flesh and blood will keep as fresh as New Zealand mutton forever, and Heaven knows it is cold enough here. The sun never gets in here; no animal comes here to tear or destroy. No doubt his slave, of whom he speaks on the map, took off his clothes and left him. He could not have buried him alone. Look here," he went. on, stooping down and picking up a queer-shaped bone scraped at the end into a sharp point, "here is the 'cleft- bone' that he used to draw the map with."
We gazed astonished for a moment, forgetting our own miseries in the extraordinary and, as it seemed to us, semi-miraculous sight.
"Ay," said "Sir Henry, "and here is where he got his ink from," and he pointed to a small wound on the dead man's left arm. "Did ever man see such a thing before?"
There was no longer any doubt about the matter, which I confess, for my own part, perfectly appalled me. There he sat, the dead man, whose directions, written some ten generations ago, bad led us to this spot. There in my own hand was the rude pen with which he had written them, and there round his neck was the crucifix his dying lips had kissed. Gazing at him my imagination could reconstruct the whole scene: the traveller dying of cold and starvation, and yet striving to convey the great secret he had discovered to the world; the awful loneliness of his death, of which the evidence sat before us. It even seemed to me that I could trace in his strongly- marked features a likeness to those of my poor friend Silvestre, his descendant, who had died twenty years ago in my arms, but perhaps that was fancy. At any rate, there he sat, a sad memento of the fate that so often overtakes those who would penetrate into the unknown; and there probably he will still sit, crowned with the dread majesty of death, for centuries yet unborn, to startle the eyes of wanderers like ourselves, if any such should ever come again to invade his loneliness. The thing overpowered us, already nearly done to death as we were with cold and hunger.
"Let us go," said Sir Henry, in a low voice; "stay, we will give him a companion," and, lifting up the dead body of the Hottentot Ventvo"gel, he placed it near that of the old don. Then he stooped down and with a jerk broke the rotten string of the crucifix round his neck, for his fingers were too cold to attempt to unfasten it. I believe that he still has it. I took the pen, and it is before me as I write--sometimes I sign my name with it.
Then, leaving those two, the proud white man of a past age and the poor Hottentot, to keep their eternal vigil in the midst of the eternal snows, we crept out of the cave into the welcome sunshine and resumed our path, wondering in our hearts how many hours it would be before we were even as they are.
When we had gone about half a mile we came to the edge of the plateau, for the nipple of the mountain did not rise out of its exact centre, though from the desert side it seemed to do so. What lay below us we could not see, for the landscape was wreathed in billows of morning mist. Presently, however, the higher layers of mist cleared a little, and revealed, some five hundred yards beneath us, at the end of a long slope of snow, a patch of green grass, through which a stream was running. Nor was this all. By the stream, basking in the morning sun, stood and lay a group of from ten to fifteen _i_ large antelopes _i_ at that distance we could not see what they were.
The sight filled us with an unreasoning joy. There was food in plenty if only we could get it. But the question was how to get it. The beasts were fully six hundred yards off, a very long shot, and one not to be depended on when one's life hung on the results.
Rapidly we discussed the advisability of trying to stalk the game, but finally reluctantly dismissed it. To begin with, the wind was not favorable, and further, we should be certain to be perceived, however careful we were, against the blinding background of snow which we should be obliged to traverse.
"Well, we must have a try from where we are," said Sir Henry. "Which shall it be, Quatermain, the repeating rifles or the expresses?"
Here again was a question. The Winchester repeaters---of which we had two, Umbopa carrying poor Ventvo"gel's as well as his own--were sighted up to a thousand yards, whereas the expresses were only sighted to three hundred and fifty, beyond which distance shooting with them was more or less guess-work. On the other hand, if they did hit, the express bullets, being expanding, were much more likely to bring the game down. It was a knotty point, but I made up my mind that we must risk it and use the expresses.
"Let each of us take the buck opposite to him. Aim well at the point of the shoulder, and high up," said I; "and Umbopa, do you give the word, so that we may all fire together."
Then came a pause, each man aiming his level best, as indeed one is likely to do when one knows that life itself depends upon the shot.
