Again there was silence and again it was broken, this time by the Motombo, who rose from his seat before which he stood, a huge, bloated object, and roared aloud in his rage.  Yes, he roared like a wounded buffalo.  Never would I have believed that such a vast volume of sound could have proceeded from the lungs of a single aged man.  For fully a minute his furious bellowings echoed down that great cave, while all the Pongo soldiers, rising from their recumbent position, pointed their hands, in some of which torches still burned, at the miserable Kalubi on whom their wrath seemed to be concentrated, rather than on us, and hissed like snakes.

Really it might have been a scene in hell with the Motombo playing the part of Satan.  Indeed, his swollen, diabolical figure supported on the thin, toad-like legs, the great fires burning on either side, the lurid lights of evening reflected from the still water beyond and glowering among the tree tops of the mountain, the white-robed forms of the tall Pongo, bending, every one of them, towards the wretched culprit and hissing like so many fierce serpents, all suggested some uttermost deep in the infernal regions as one might conceive them in a nightmare.

It went on for some time, I don’t know how long, till at length the Motombo picked up his fantastically shaped horn and blew.  Thereon the women darted from the various doorways, but seeing that they were not wanted, checked themselves in their stride and remained standing so, in the very attitude of runners about to start upon a race.  As the blast of the horn died away the turmoil was suddenly succeeded by an utter stillness, broken only by the crackling of the fires whose flames, of all the living things in that place, alone seemed heedless of the tragedy which was being played.

“All up now, old fellow!” whispered Stephen to me in a shaky voice.

“Yes,” I answered, “all up high as heaven, where I hope we are going.  Now back to back, and let’s make the best fight we can.  We’ve got the spears.”

While we were closing in the Motombo began to speak.

“So you plotted to kill the god, Kalubi-who-was,” he screamed, “with these white ones whom you would pay with the Holy Flower and her who guards it.  Good!  You shall go, all of you, and talk with the god.  And I, watching here, will learn who dies—­you or the god.  Away with them!”

CHAPTER XVI

THE GODS

With a roar the Pongo soldiers leapt on us.  I think that Mavovo managed to get his spear up and kill a man, for I saw one of them fall backwards and lie still.  But they were too quick for the rest of us.  In half a minute we were seized, the spears were wrenched from our hands and we were thrown headlong into the canoe, all six of us, or rather seven including the Kalubi.  A number of the soldiers, including Komba, who acted as steersman, also sprang into the canoe that was instantly pushed out from beneath the bridge or platform on which the Motombo sat and down the little creek into the still water of the canal or estuary, or whatever it may be, that separates the wall of rock which the cave pierces from the base of the mountain.