It was a strange landscape; and any passing traveller, knowing nothing of the Simiacine, must perforce have seen at once that these insignificant little trees were something quite apart in the vegetable kingdom. Each standing with its magic circle, no bird built its nest within the branches--no insect constructed its filmy home--no spider weaved its busy web from twig to twig. Solitary, mournful, lifeless the Plateau which had nearly cost Victor Durnovo his life lay beneath the face of heaven, far above the surrounding country--the summit of an unnamed mountain--a land lying in the heart of a tropic country which was neither tropic, temperate, nor arctic. Fauna had it none, for it produced nothing that could sustain life. Flora it knew not, for the little trees, with their perennial fortune of brilliant brown-tinted leaves, monopolised vegetable life, and slew all comers. It seemed like some stray tract of another planet, where the condition of living things was different. There was a strange sense of having been thrown up--thrown up, as it were, into mid-heaven, there to hang for ever--neither this world nor the world to come. The silence of it all was such as would drive men mad if they came to think of it. It was the silence of the stars. The men who had lived up here for three months did not look quite natural. There was a singular heaviness of the eyelids which all had noticed, though none had spoken of it. A craving for animal food, which could only be stayed by the consumption of abnormal quantities of meat, kept the hunters ever at work on the lower slopes of the mountain. Sleep was broken, and uncanny things happened in the night. Men said that they saw other men like trees, walking abroad with sightless eyes; and Joseph said, “Gammon, my festive darky--gammon!” but he, nevertheless, glanced somewhat uneasily towards his master whenever the natives said such things. A clearing had been made on that part of the Plateau which was most accessible from below. The Simiacine trees had been ruthlessly cut away--even the roots were grubbed up and burnt--far away on the leeward side of the little kingdom. This was done because there arose at sunset a soft and pleasant odour from the bushes which seemed to affect the nerves, and even made the teeth chatter. It was, therefore, deemed wise that the camp should stand on bare ground.