understood.  The rock was softer here, and centuries of flood had eaten it away, leaving a crack in the stratum which the crocodiles had found out and enlarged.  Down she went on her hands and knees, and thrusting the lantern in front of her, crept along that noisome drain, for this was what it resembled.  And now—­oh! now she felt air blowing in her face, and heard the sound of reeds whispering, and water running, and saw hanging like a lamp in the blue sky, a star—­the morning star!  Benita could have wept, she could have worshipped it, yet she pushed on between rocks till she found herself among tall reeds, and standing in water.  She had gained the banks of the Zambesi.

Instantly, by instinct as it were, Benita extinguished her candle, fearing lest it should betray her, for constant danger had made her very cunning.  The dawn had not yet broken, but the waning moon and the stars gave a good light.  She paused to look.  There above her towered the outermost wall of Bambatse, against which the river washed, except at such times as the present, when it was very low.

So she was not in the fortress as she had hoped, but without it, and oh! what should she do?  Go back again?  How would that serve her father or herself?  Go on?  Then she might fall into the hands of the Matabele whose camp was a little lower down, as from her perch upon the top of the cone she had seen that poor white man do.  Ah! the white man!  If only he lived and she could reach him!  Perhaps they had not killed him after all.  It was madness, yet she would try to discover; something impelled her to take the risk.  If she failed and escaped, perhaps then she might call to the Makalanga, and they would let down a rope and draw her up the wall before the Matabele caught her.  She would not go back empty-handed, to die in that dreadful place with her poor father.  Better perish here in the sweet air and beneath the stars, even if it were upon a Matabele spear, or by a bullet from her own pistol.

She looked about her to take her bearings in case it should ever be necessary for her to return to the entrance of the cave.  This proved easy, for a hundred or so feet above her—­where the sheer face of the cliff jutted out a little, at that very spot indeed on which tradition said that the body of the Senora da Ferreira had struck in its fall, and the necklace Benita wore to-day was torn from her—­a stunted mimosa grew in some cleft of the rock.  To mark the crocodile run itself she bent down a bunch of reeds, and having first lit a few Tandstickor brimstone matches and thrown them about inside of it, that the smell of them might scare the beast should it wish to return, she set her lantern behind a stone near to the mouth of the hole.