The colonel with a slight gesture pointed to the right, and there before them lay the _Isle of Skeletons_. A strange fatality had drifted them a second time to this awful spot. Guy shuddered, but the colonel rose, and brushing past him stepped on shore. Forbes followed him in silence, and then Canaris staggered blindly past. After a brief hesitation Guy stepped out, and dragged the canoe half way up the sand. Sir Arthur never moved. He was sleeping and no one dared disturb him. They sat down in a row on the sand. "It's as good a place as any to die," said Forbes hoarsely. "The bones will soon have company." He paused, frightened at his own voice, and no one replied. For a while they sat in silence. Guy stuck the torch in the sand and it blazed away with a merry light. Somehow or other the ray of hope that had animated him a little while before had vanished, leaving only a dull despair, a reluctance to face the horror of the situation. "Is there no--no chance--for us?" he ventured to say timidly. "Absolutely none," replied the colonel, in a firm voice. "You told us a while ago, Chutney, that our doom was sealed. I have faced the situation as calmly and clearly as possible from every conceivable aspect, and I now tell you on my own responsibility that we will never leave this cavern. The fatal error was made when we took the right-hand channel of the two, or rather when the current led us to the right. That was not our blunder, of course. We were in the hands of destiny. We are now, as you know, on the bosom of a vast lake. Water of an unknown depth is beneath us. Overhead is a vaulted dome of great height, probably the hollowed interior of a mountain; on all sides are massive and perpendicular walls of rock, impregnable and insurmountable. "The lake is undoubtedly ten miles or more in circumference, and, as you know well, there is no surface outlet. There is an entrance, but we can no more force our way back through that entrance than we could swim up through the Falls of Niagara or ride the Nile Cataracts in a Rob Roy canoe. As long as our provisions last we shall live. When we no longer have anything to eat we shall die, and the next explorer who enters this lake will find our bones mingled with those lying behind us." "And what will _he_ do?" asked Guy. "Perish like those before him," said the colonel. "This death trap caught many a victim and will catch many more. The light of day will never pierce this gloom." The colonel spoke as though he were demonstrating a problem in Euclid or laying down plans for a campaign.