By the time that Stranahan and Ripley had been absent forty-eight hours, the crew was in a state of impatience verging upon madness. The fluttering of a feather would have sent them scampering like frightened horses; the buzzing of a bee might have been the signal for spasms of dread. On one occasion, indeed, the chirping of some cricket-like insect did put half a dozen of the men into a panic; and on another occasion three or four of them turned pale merely upon hearing the swishing and flapping of a small fish in the river. It was when the excitement was nearing its highest that the Captain called once more for volunteers to search for the missing men. But so deep-rooted and paralyzing was the general alarm that only two of us offered our names--young Phil Rawson and myself. I do not know what strange wave of courage had suddenly emboldened this timorous recruit while less callow men held back. For my own part, I must admit that I volunteered from the mere desire to escape from ennui and the half-frenzied rabble of my comrades. But, whatever our motives, we were promptly to be launched into adventures that were not only to test our hardihood, but to prove interesting beyond anything we could have imagined. * * * * * [Illustration: --and from a narrow focus of flame, two huge burning green eyes would shoot forth, darting cold malice at us through the glass port.... Or else a tiny flattened disk, softly phosphorescent throughout and marked on one surface by two bright beady eyes, would come floating in our direction like a pale apparition....] * * * * * CHAPTER IV A Tour of Exploration Rawson and I had been gone not half an hour when the aspect of the country began suddenly to change. It was as though we had passed some indistinguishable boundary, for the boulders were rapidly becoming less numerous, and at length disappeared entirely, while at the same time the odd, mossy vegetation became astonishingly rich and profuse. Or, to be precise, it gave place to a different vegetation entirely, an unearthly vegetation, almost too strange for belief. At the risk of being accused of fabrication, I must describe those incredible plants: the creepers with long leaves of lace-like brown, which twined in dainty wreaths and veils about the olive-green boles of limbless trees, the bushes, shaped like starfishes, and of the hue of dried grass, with diaphanous flowers that a breath might have blown away; the cinnamon-brown reeds that rose to double a man’s height, ending in a profusion of cucumber-shaped fruits; the peculiar, abundant growth that looked at a distance like a great earthen jar, but proved upon closer examination to be the hollow container of a species of milk-white down that grew in long and silken strands like untended hair.