CHAPTER XVI
"most remarkable"
SEVERAL miles south of the cabin, upon a strip of sandy beach, stood two old men, arguing.
Before them stretched the broad Atlantic; at their backs the Dark Continent; close around them loomed the impenetrable blackness of the jungle.
Savage beasts roared and growled; noises, hideous and weird, assailed their ears. They had wandered for miles in search of their camp; but always in the wrong direction. They were as hopelessly lost as though they suddenly had been transported to another world.
At such a time indeed must every fiber of their combined intellects have been concentrated upon the vital question of the minute—the life-and-death question to them of retracing their steps to camp.
Samuel T. Philander was speaking.
"But, my dear professor," he was saying, "I still maintain that but for the victories of Ferdinand and Isabella over the fifteenth-century Moors in Spain the world would be today a thousand years in advance of where we now find ourselves.
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