Animals -- Juvenile fiction; Fantasy literature; Human-animal communication -- Juvenile fiction; Voyages and travels -- Juvenile fiction
“But where are you going to look?” I asked. “Miranda said the island
was a hundred miles long and the mountains seem to run all the way down
the centre of it.”
“Didn’t you see the last picture?” he said, grabbing up his hat from
the ground and cramming it on his head. “It was an oddly shaped
mountain—looked like a hawk’s head. Well, there’s where he is—if he’s
still alive. First thing for us to do, is to get up on a high peak and
look around the island for a mountain shaped like a hawks’ head—Just
to think of it! There’s a chance of my meeting Long Arrow, the son of
Golden Arrow, after all!—Come on! Hurry! To delay may mean death to the
greatest naturalist ever born!”
_THE SEVENTH CHAPTER_
HAWK’S-HEAD MOUNTAIN
WE all agreed afterwards that none of us had ever worked so hard in our
lives before as we did that day. For my part, I know I was often on the
point of dropping exhausted with fatigue; but I just kept on going—like
a machine—determined that, whatever happened, _I_ would not be the
first to give up.
When we had scrambled to the top of a high peak, almost instantly we
saw the strange mountain pictured in the letter. In shape it was the
perfect image of a hawk’s head, and was, as far as we could see, the
second highest summit in the island.
Although we were all out of breath from our climb, the Doctor didn’t
let us rest a second as soon as he had sighted it. With one look at the
sun for direction, down he dashed again, breaking through thickets,
splashing over brooks, taking all the short cuts. For a fat man, he was
certainly the swiftest cross-country runner I ever saw.
We floundered after him as fast as we could. When I say _we_, I mean
Bumpo and myself; for the animals, Jip, Chee-Chee and Polynesia, were
a long way ahead—even beyond the Doctor—enjoying the hunt like a
paper-chase.
At length we arrived at the foot of the mountain we were making for;
and we found its sides very steep. Said the Doctor,
“Now we will separate and search for caves. This spot where we now are,
will be our meeting-place. If anyone finds anything like a cave or a
hole where the earth and rocks have fallen in, he must shout and hulloa
to the rest of us. If we find nothing we will all gather here in about
an hour’s time—Everybody understand?”
Then we all went off our different ways.
Each of us, you may be sure, was anxious to be the one to make a
discovery. And never was a mountain searched so thoroughly. But alas!
nothing could we find that looked in the least like a fallen-in cave.
There were plenty of places where rocks had tumbled down to the foot
of the slopes; but none of these appeared as though caves or passages
could possibly lie behind them.
One by one, tired and disappointed, we straggled back to the
meeting-place. The Doctor seemed gloomy and impatient but by no means
inclined to give up.
“Jip,” he said, “couldn’t you _smell_ anything like an Indian anywhere?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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