Thus encouraged, they increased their pace, and before long a cool breeze fanned their heated cheeks. Used as they had become to the stagnant, motionless atmosphere of the underworld, the gentle current came to the adventurers as a veritable life-giving elixir. It intoxicated them, indeed, for a little while, caused a species of madness, wherein the only thing of which they were conscious was the yearning to get out into the open. It spurred them on to such efforts that the Ayuti, for all his strength, had considerable difficulty in keeping pace with them. Never before had the prospect of gazing upon the face of Nature inspired them with such wildly delirious joy. Even the cool-blooded American succumbed to the rapture of the moment. Hope surged high within them all. The Ayuti alone was grave and preoccupied. The hours he had spent with these new comrades had been pleasant enough, but he knew that they longed to return to their own world. They could not be happy in the gloom of the underworld. They were children of the light, and Ramouni, the sun god, was calling them back to bask once more in his bright rays; and he, Chenobi, must return to his life of solitude, to range the jungles till death came to him. So thought the king. Little wonder that he was silent and grave. It had been better, he mused, if these white strangers had never come to his land; he would then have been content with his animals, and with the lonely life to which a cruel fate had doomed him. But now he longed for a comrade to share his solitude, and to divide the spoils of the chase. With an effort he shook off these imaginings, and applied himself more vigorously to the ascent. An hour passed by, and then an excited cry broke from Seymour: “The moon!” An instant later the party emerged into the full glory of the orb of night. For a while they stood drinking in the beauty of the scene around. They were standing in the crater of an extinct volcano. Imagine a vast well, many hundreds of feet in depth and over a mile in diameter at its base, its rugged walls--sloping slightly outward as they rose--covered with a mass of tropical vegetation whose every leaf gleamed like silver beneath the beams of the full moon that hung high above. This was the scene that met the gaze of the adventurers. Leaving them gazing, Chenobi vanished into the shadow of the cliffs, returning presently with the skin bottle he carried full of clear water. “Drink,” he said shortly, and to such good purpose did his friends obey that the bottle had to be replenished ere their thirst was satisfied. Then, thoroughly tired out, they flung themselves down where they stood, and, with the rich scents of a tropical forest in their nostrils, dropped off to sleep, leaving the Ayuti pacing to and fro across the crater floor.