“Those are the people who ate my men!  That is the cavern where Tippoo Tib hid the ivory!  That is where my men’s bones are!  See—­they have torn my tent for clothing for their naked women!”

We put Hassan under double guard for fear lest he bolt again and leave us.  And all that day, and all the next we hunted for cannibals through mazy caverns that seemed to extend into the mountain’s very womb.  There were times when the stench was so horrible we nearly fainted.  We stumbled on men’s bones.  We collided with sharp projections in the gloom—­fell down holes that might have been bottomless for aught we knew in advance—­and scrambled over ledges that in places were smooth with the wear of feet for ages.  Everlastingly to right, or left of us, or up above, or down below we could hear the inhabitants scampering away.  Now and then an arrow would flitter between us; but their supply of ammunition seemed very scanty.

At night we camped in the cavern mouth to cut off all escape, and resumed the hunt at dawn.  But the caverns were hot—­hotter by contrast with the biting winds outside; and when in the afternoon of the second day we all came out to breathe and cool off the running sweat, we saw the whole tribe—­scarcely more than fifty of them—­emerge from an opening above, whose existence we had not guessed, and go scampering away along a ledge like monkeys.  Some of them stopped to throw stones at us—­impotent, aimless stones that fell half-way; and Fred sent three bullets after them, chipping bits from the ledge, after which they showed us a turn of speed that was simply incredible, and vanished.

“Now for the great disillusionment!” laughed Will.  “Hassan!  Go forward, and show us where that hoard of ivory ought ta be!”

We all expected disillusionment.  Brown, who was under no delusion as to his share in the venture, scoffed openly at the idea of finding anything buried, in a land where every living “crittur,” as he put it, was a thief from birth.  But Hassan led on in, fearless now that the cannibals were gone, and positive as if he led into his own house and would show his house-hold treasures.

He stopped before a black-mouthed chasm, two or three hundred yards along the smallest subdivision of the cavern, and called for lights and a rope.  We lit lanterns, and he showed us men’s bones lying everywhere in grisly confusion.

“Tippoo Tib his men!” he remarked.  “They throwing ivory in here, then byumby men who eat men kill and eat them.  I alone living to tell!  Plenty men who eat men in those days—­all mountains full of them!”

He tied a lantern to a rope and lowered it down what looked like an old vent-hole in the lava.  But the little light was lost in the enormous blackness, and we could see nothing.

“Send a man down!” he counseled.

We leaned over the edge and sniffed.  There was a faint smell of what might be sulphur, but not enough to hurt.