"An old Scotch air," he had said, "may help to 'liven us up when things look black and drear." They had travelled thus far almost without adventure. They were now in the very heart of the warlike Logobos, but as yet had seen nothing more terrible than the denizens of forests and river I have already described. CHAPTER NINETEEN. THE SEARCH FOR THE LAND OF GOLD. Scene:--Daybreak on the unknown river. The stream is a good mile wide here; its banks are lined with a cloudland of green, the great trees trailing their branches in the water. A sand bar at one side, jutting far out into the river, tall crimson ibises standing thereon like a regiment of British soldiers. The mist of morning uprising everywhere off the woods and off the water. One long red cloud in the east heralding the approach of the god of day. Silence over all, except for the dip of the oars--they are muffled--as our adventurers' boat rapidly nears the shore to seek the friendly shelter of the tree-fringe. "So far on our way, thank heaven," said Kenneth, as soon as the boat was hidden and the party had landed on a little bank deeply bedded with brown leaves. "So far, and now for breakfast." Yes, now for breakfast, reader, and a very frugal one it was; some handfuls of boiled rice and a morsel of biscuit steeped in the water to make it go down. This had been their fare for days and days, but added thereto was the fruit that Essequibo never failed to find. Fish there were in this great river in abundance, fish that they had plenty of means of catching too, but none of cooking without danger; for smoke might betray their presence to an enemy more implacable and merciless than the wildest beast in the jungle. The long hot day passed drearily away. They sat or reclined mostly in a circle, carrying on a conversation in voices but little over a whisper. When the day was at its very hottest, when there was not a leaf stirring in the branches above, when the monkeys that more than once had visited them, creeping nearer and nearer with curious half-frightened gaze, had sought the darkest, coolest nooks of the forest, and the-- "Strange bright birds on starry wing--" had ceased their low plaintive songs, and sat open-mouthed and all a-gasp on the boughs, then sleep stole over every one, and it was far into the afternoon ere they awoke. The sun went down at last, and darkness--a tropical darkness--very soon followed. Lights might now be seen flitting about among the trees; the fire-flies and curious creeping things went gliding hither and thither on the ground, all ablaze with phosphorescent light. Yonder knobs of fire that jump about so mysteriously are beetles; that long line of fire wriggling snake-like at the tree foot is the dreaded brown centipede, whose bite is death.