* * * * *

The Cross stands upright in the southern sky.  It is the middle of the night.  Cary and Yeo glide silently up the hill and into the camp, and whisper to Amyas that they have done the deed.  The sleepers are awakened, and the train sets forth.

Upward and southward ever:  but whither, who can tell?  They hardly think of the whither; but go like sleep-walkers, shaken out of one land of dreams, only to find themselves in another and stranger one.  All around is fantastic and unearthly; now each man starts as he sees the figures of his fellows, clothed from head to foot in golden filigree; looks up, and sees the yellow moonlight through the fronds of the huge tree-ferns overhead, as through a cloud of glittering lace.  Now they are hewing their way through a thicket of enormous flags; now through bamboos forty feet high; now they are stumbling over boulders, waist-deep in cushions of club-moss; now they are struggling through shrubberies of heaths and rhododendrons, and woolly incense-trees, where every leaf, as they brush past, dashes some fresh scent into their faces, and

     “The winds, with musky wing,
     About the cedarn alleys fling
     Nard and cassia’s balmy smells.”

Now they open upon some craggy brow, from whence they can see far below an ocean of soft cloud, whose silver billows, girdled by the mountain sides, hide the lowland from their sight.

And from beneath the cloud strange voices rise; the screams of thousand night-birds, and wild howls, which they used at first to fancy were the cries of ravenous beasts, till they found them to proceed from nothing fiercer than an ape.  But what is that deeper note, like a series of muffled explosions,—­arquebuses fired within some subterranean cavern,—­the heavy pulse of which rolls up through the depths of the unseen forest?  They hear it now for the first time, but they will hear it many a time again; and the Indian lad is hushed, and cowers close to them, and then takes heart, as he looks upon their swords and arquebuses; for that is the roar of the jaguar, “seeking his meat from God.”

But what is that glare away to the northward?  The yellow moon is ringed with gay rainbows; but that light is far too red to be the reflection of any beams of hers.  Now through the cloud rises a column of black and lurid smoke; the fog clears away right and left around it, and shows beneath, a mighty fire.

The men look at each other with questioning eyes, each half suspecting, and yet not daring to confess their own suspicions; and Amyas whispers to Yeo—­

“You took care to flood the powder?”

“Ay, ay, sir, and to unload the ordnance too.  No use in making a noise to tell the Spaniards our whereabouts.”

Yes; that glare rises from the good ship Rose.  Amyas, like Cortez of old, has burnt his ship, and retreat is now impossible.  Forward into the unknown abyss of the New World, and God be with them as they go!