With Williams, the boatswain, carrying a lantern, we pushed into the brush, following the choked trail that led to Leavitt’s abode.  But the bungalow, when we had reached the clearing and could discern the outlines of the building against the masses of the forest, was dark and deserted.  As we mounted the veranda, the loose boards creaked hollowly under our tread; the doorway, from which depended a tattered curtain of coarse burlap, gaped black and empty.

The lantern, lifted high in the boatswain’s hand, cleft at a stroke the darkness within.  On the writing-table, cluttered with papers and bits of volcanic rock, stood a bottle and half-empty glass.  Things lay about in lugubrious disorder, as if the place had been hurriedly ransacked by a thief.  Some of the geological specimens had tumbled from the table to the floor, and stray sheets of Leavitt’s manuscripts lay under his chair.  Leavitt’s books, ranged on shelving against the wall, alone seemed undisturbed.  Upon the top of the shelving stood two enormous stuffed birds, moldering and decrepit, regarding the sudden illumination with unblinking, bead-like eyes.  Between them a small dancing faun in greenish bronze tripped a Bacchic measure with head thrown back in a transport of derisive laughter.

For a long moment the three of us faced the silent, disordered room, in which the little bronze faun alone seemed alive, convulsed with diabolical mirth at our entrance.  Somehow it recalled to me Leavitt’s own cynical laugh.  Suddenly Miss Stanleigh made toward the photographs above the bookshelves.

“This is he,” she said, taking up one of the faded prints.

“Yes—­Leavitt,” I answered.

“Leavitt?” Her fingers tightened upon the photograph.  Then, abruptly, it fell to the floor.  “Yes, yes—­of course.”  Her eyes closed very slowly, as if an extreme weakness had seized her.

In the shock of that moment I reached out to support her, but she checked my hand.  Her gray eyes opened again.  A shudder visibly went over her, as if the night air had suddenly become chill.  From the shelf the two stuffed birds regarded us dolefully, while the dancing faun, with head thrown back in an attitude of immortal art, laughed derisively.

“Where is he?  I must speak to him,” said Miss Stanleigh.

“One might think he were deliberately hiding,” I muttered, for I was at a loss to account for Leavitt’s absence.

“Then find him,” the girl commanded.  I cut short my speculations to direct Williams to search the hut in the rear of the bungalow, where, behind bamboo palings, Leavitt’s Malay servant maintained an aloof and mysterious existence.  I sat down beside Miss Stanleigh on the veranda steps to find my hands sooty from the touch of the boards.  A fine volcanic ash was evidently drifting in the air, and now to my ear, attuned to the profound stillness, the wind bore a faint humming sound.

“Do you hear that?” I whispered.  It was like the far-off murmur of a gigantic caldron, softly a-boil—­a dull vibration that seemed to reach us through the ground as well as through the air.