and when they hurry to the spot they find only a disfigured corpse, lying with bare feet and disordered night dress in the darkness of the stormy November night, and with the fatal glass still clasped in its hand.
My task is done. In possession of the evidence thus placed before you, your judgment of its result will be as good as mine. Link by link you have now been put in possession of the entire chain. Is that chain one of purely accidental coincidences, or does it point with terrible certainty to a series of crimes, in their nature and execution almost too horrible to contemplate? That is the first question to be asked, and it is one to which I confess myself unable to reply. The second is more strange, and perhaps even more difficult still. Supposing the latter to be the case, are crimes thus committed susceptible of proof, or even if proved, are they of a kind for which the criminal can be brought to punishment?
TERRIFIC COMBAT BETWEEN A GORILLA AND A LION.
(FROM A FORTHCOMING WORK, ENTITLED “ADVENTURES IN MANY LANDS.”)
My black guide, whose movements were as noiseless and gliding as those of a snake, was about two yards in front of me, pushing gently but swiftly on hands and knees through the tangled underwood and thorny creepers, which made the entrance into the dense and gloomy recesses of the primæval African forest almost impassable to the hardiest of the human race, and I was eagerly following in the track which he had made, when suddenly he paused, uttered a low slight hiss, and placing his right hand behind him, made with it a gentle movement, warning me to be silent and cautious.
How long we both remained motionless and hardly daring to draw a breath I know not. It may have been five minutes. It appeared to me as many hours. I felt neither fear nor apprehension of danger, but my anxiety to obtain a sight of a living gorilla, and, if possible, to get within shot of him, and the hope that my black hunter had at length marked one, caused my heart to throb with expectation so loudly, that in order to still it I was obliged to hold my breath forcibly until the sense of suffocation became unbearable, and it was with great difficulty I repressed a spasmodic tendency to relieve the oppressed lungs by a scream. At length my guide moved forwards, but so silently that his progress was more like that of a shadow than of anything having life and weight in it. His hand was still carried behind him, the open palm towards me, and every motion of the fingers instinct with intelligence and warnings of the presence of danger the most imminent and deadly. The Fan (my guide was a splendid specimen of that noblest of the Central African tribes) again stopped. His palm expanded, and I instantly paused. The ground shook with a slight tremour. The air vibrated around us and beat flutteringly upon our ears, as the reader may have felt when the deepest bass of a great organ is gently touched. At first I did not perceive that the agitation was the result of sound, but as the vibration was passing away I distinguished a low deep roar, and found that some terrible beast, most probably either a lion or a gorilla, was close at hand, and was either conversing in a low tone with his mate, or was uttering the first notes of suspicion or alarm.
I had seen the nasty little birds which attend the rhinoceros and perform for the deep folds of his thick but not insensible hide the duty which in civilised society is remitted to the small-tooth-comb. I knew how sharp a watch and ward they keep over the safety of their living feeding-ground, and how they scream and dig their sharp and searching beaks into the fierce brute’s ear when anything dangerous or strange approaches his resting-place; and I feared lest some such courtierly parasite of the woods might have attached itself to the service and the court of the anthropoidal apish monarch, and was now whispering into his majesty’s ear its suspicions that certain barbarian invaders or low and villanous revolutionists of an inferior order of the gorilla species were trespassing within the bounds which his majesty had been graciously pleased to reserve as the limits of his own exclusive private domain. I listened, but no particular note or chirp struck my ear. The silence was almost appalling; so was the darkness of that portion of the dense forest into which we had penetrated. Very shortly after we had entered the woods the fierce glare of the sun had ceased to penetrate to the ground except at rare intervals. The broad luxuriant upper foliage of the mighty trees completely excluded the blaze of the tropical sun, which shone down through a yellow atmosphere like the mouth of an open furnace, from a sphere of polished, glaring, reddened brass. At first there were cool extensive forest glades, and vast avenues of gigantic trees, populous and noisy with birds of gorgeous plumage but discordant voices; then came closer stems and lesser growth of scions springing emulously up amidst the giant parents of the woods. Thick tangles of tough-stalked creepers intertwining with thorny plants, like briars of gigantic growth, next barred our path in places which were thereby made absolutely impenetrable. At length, after threading our way through tracks which the wild animals had slightly made, we reached those darkest densest portions of the woods where the Fan hunter knew that the gorilla could be only found, if found at all.
Here, in the interpenetralia, the voices of the forest had altogether ceased. The hiss of a serpent, the twitter of a grasshopper or locust, the hoot of an owl, or the chatter of a stray monkey might indeed be occasionally heard, but such sounds were few and far between, and they served rather to illustrate and mark the silence by showing how exceptional and discordant with all things around they were. The darkness, although nearly as deep as that of a starless night, was not nightlike. It was not thick and close and pitchy, provocative of closed eyes and slumber; it was a greenish black, living, startling, intelligent and wakeful, as though the light were struggling to break through from the outside, and exciting hope that it would succeed momentarily. The eyes strained to pierce the verdant gloom. They
