The path to the pool was not difficult to find, for a great silk-cotton tree stood at the junction and flung its huge serpent-like roots right across the road; so I strode along it with confidence, and soon came in sight of the grim idol which stood out, a hideous silhouette, against the moonlit opening. And certainly if it was frightful by daylight it now looked truly diabolical, and I half sympathised with Alhassan as I passed it in the gloom. It was quite a relief to get out into the open space by the pool; and very lovely the little lake appeared in the clear moonlight, its farther margin shrouded under the dark wall of forest and the tall monolith of the tusked rock faithfully repeated below its quiet surface. I followed the path round the brink to a place that I had settled upon at my first visit, where a tree jutted out nearly horizontally, with its trunk partially immersed in the water. I had chosen this spot for two reasons. In the first place it was near to the spring, and I had calculated that, if there was really gold in the bed of the pool, that gold must be brought by the spring, and, as the heavy gold dust would settle sooner than the earthy sediment, the bottom in the neighbourhood of the fountain would be richest in gold. My second reason was the tree itself, which would form a kind of stage, convenient to work from. I now hastily prepared my appliances. Passing the end of the line through the hole in the iron sinker I made it fast with a couple of half hitches. Then I took a lump of the shea butter and pressed it into the hollow at the end of the sinker to form what sailors call an “arming.” Kicking off my slippers to make my foothold safer, I crept out on to the tree trunk as far as I could, and, taking the coil of line in one hand, with the other softly dropped the sinker into the water, letting the line run through my fingers until I felt the iron thump on the bottom. Then I drew it up and crawled back on to the bank to examine it. The arming of shea butter was covered by a thick layer of greyish mud, but, although I inspected it most minutely, to my deep disappointment I could not discover a trace of gold. However, I determined to save the mud for more thorough examination by daylight, and, to this end, sliced off with my knife the top layer of the arming and laid the muddy fragment in the rag. I then crept out on to the tree and again dropped the sinker to the bottom and returned to shore to see if I had any better fortune this time; but the mud which adhered to the sticky arming was similar to that brought up by the first cast--soft grey deposit with never a trace of sparkle or colour. I was stooping over the rag with the sinker in my hand, comparing the two soundings, when, chancing to glance up, my eye was attracted by the swaying shadows of foliage on the white, lichen-clad trunk of a tree close by; and even as I looked, another shadow appeared on the tree and slowly moved across it--the shadow of a man’s head.