It soon appeared that this passage did not serve for those gigantic animals alone.  Human beings had more than once taken this route, but as flocks, brutally led to the slaughter-house, would have followed it.  Here and there bones of dead bodies strewed the ground; remains of skeletons, half gnawed by animals, some of which still bore the slave’s fetters.

There are, in Central Africa, long roads thus marked out by human debris.  Hundreds of miles are traversed by caravans, and how many unhappy wretches fall by the way, under the agents’ whips, killed by fatigue or privations, decimated by sickness!  How many more massacred by the traders themselves, when food fails!  Yes, when they can no longer feed them, they kill them with the gun, with the sword, with the knife!  These massacres are not rare.

So, then, caravans of slaves had followed this road.  For a mile Dick Sand and his companions struck against these scattered bones at each step, putting to flight enormous fern-owls.  Those owls rose at their approach, with a heavy flight, and turned round in the air.

Mrs. Weldon looked without seeing.  Dick Sand trembled lest she should question him, for he hoped to lead her back to the coast without telling her that Harris’s treachery had led them astray in an African province.  Fortunately, Mrs. Weldon did not explain to herself what she had under her eyes.  She had desired to take her child again, and little Jack, asleep, absorbed all her care.  Nan walked near her, and neither of them asked the young novice the terrible questions he dreaded.

Old Tom went along with his eyes down.  He understood only too well why this opening was strewn with human bones.

His companions looked to the right, to the left, with an air of surprise, as if they were crossing an interminable cemetery, the tombs of which had been overthrown by a cataclysm; but they passed in silence.

Meanwhile, the bed of the rivulet became deeper and wider at the same time.  Its current was less impetuous.  Dick Sand hoped that it would soon become navigable, or that it would before long reach a more important river, tributary to the Atlantic.

Cost what it might, the young novice was determined to follow this stream of water.  Neither did he hesitate to abandon this opening; because, as ending by an oblique line, it led away from the rivulet.

The little party a second time ventured through the dense underwood.  They marched, ax in hand, through leaves and bushes inextricably interlaced.

But if this vegetation obstructed the ground, they were no longer in the thick forest that bordered the coast.  Trees became rare.  Large sheaves of bamboo alone rose above the grass, and so high that even Hercules was not a head over them.  The passage of the little party was only revealed by the movement of these stalks.

Toward three o’clock in the afternoon of that day, the nature of the ground totally changed.  Here were long plains, which must have been entirely inundated in the rainy season.  The earth, now more swampy, was carpeted by thick mosses, beneath charming ferns.  Should it be diversified by any steep ascents, they would see brown hematites appear, the last deposits of some rich vein of mineral.