And more than once he had to be dragged forcibly away from the fallen porter, whom he battered with both fists. Had he had his will, he would have allowed no time for meals, and only a few hours' halt for rest. Guy Oscard did not understand it. His denser nerves were incapable of comprehending the state of irritation and unreasoning restlessness into which the climate and excitement had brought Durnovo. But Meredith, in his finer organisation, understood the case better. He it was who soothingly explained the necessity for giving the men a longer rest. He alone could persuade Durnovo to lie down at night and cease his perpetual calculations. The man's hands were so unsteady that he could hardly take the sights necessary to determine their position in this sea-like waste. And to Jack alone did Victor Durnovo ever approach the precincts of mutual confidence. “I can't help it, Meredith,” he said one day, with a scared look, after a particularly violent outburst of temper. “I don't know what it is. I sometimes think I am going mad.” And soon after that the change was made. An advance column, commanded by Meredith and Durnovo, was selected to push on to the Plateau, while Oscard and Joseph followed more leisurely with the baggage and the slower travellers. One of the strangest journeys in the vast unwritten history of commercial advance was that made by the five men from the camp of the main expedition across the lower slopes of a mountain range--unmarked on any map, unnamed by any geographer--to the mysterious Simiacine Plateau. It almost seemed as if the wild, bloodshot eyes of their guide could pierce the density of the forest where Nature had held unchecked, untrimmed sway for countless generations. Victor Durnovo noted a thousand indications unseen by his four companions. The journey no longer partook of the nature of a carefully calculated progress across a country untrodden by a white man's foot; it was a wild rush in a straight line through unbroken forest fastness, guided by an instinct that was stronger than knowledge. And the only Englishman in the party--Jack Meredith--had to choose between madness and rest. He knew enough of the human brain to be convinced that the only possible relief to this tension was success. Victor Durnovo would never know rest now until he reached the spot where the Simiacine should be. If the trees were there, growing, as he said, in solitary state and order, strangely suggestive of human handiwork, then Victor Durnovo was saved. If no such spot was found, madness and death could only follow. To save his companion's reason, Meredith more than once drugged his food; but when the land began to rise beneath their feet in tentative, billow-like inequalities--the deposit of a glacial age--Durnovo refused to stop for the preparation of food. Eating dry biscuits and stringy tinned meat as they went along, the four men--three blacks and one white--followed in the footsteps of their mad pilot.