By afternoon, the mainland had become quite visible, jungly foothills rising ridge on ridge to the base of the Great Precipice, which stretches south for two hundred miles, the greatest precipice in the world. Above it towered the snowy peaks far back in the mainland. They came to realize how utterly unknown and impenetrable it all is, when they awoke next morning to find the proa at anchor in a deep bay, with the jungly mountains all around them and a lagoon thirty miles long stretching back into the hinterland. Mangrove swamps lined the shore in an unbroken line. Here and there a dent in them told of the mouth of a stream. No living human was in sight, but the smoke of signal fires rose from points along shore, and scouting parties of native savages could be made out through the glasses already watching them, swinging through the trees over the mangroves like troops of monkeys. Now and then a long black canoe, with high carved prow, would cross the upper lagoon, driven by lines of paddling blacks. The very haste of them spelled danger, the passing of the word through the villages that a strange proa was here. A short raid on shore, a few miles into the jungle at most, unless attempted by a whole regiment of soldiers, would be certain to end in ambush and murder. As for those dense jungles and towering mountains back a day’s march into the interior--Unexplored! Danger! Pygmies! Head hunters! was written all over them! They were examining the shore curiously, with a sense of the utter hopelessness of the undertaking oppressing them, when a huge black lakatoi, or native catamaran, jutted its prow around the point of a cape to seaward. Everyone turned to watch it, and with chatterings and gesticulations the crew sprang to life. “Lakatoi, _Orang-kaya_!” sang out Sadok, pointing to seaward. She towered like a castle out of the sea. A single mast rose out of her amidships, carrying one long triangular mat sail with deeply incurved ends. Around the mast was a wooden platform, a sort of fighting deck with rails around it, and it was held down on the two log canoes which floated the structure by long bamboo arches like the backs of a bridge. The lakatoi was crowded with warriors whose spears and bows and clubs could be made out jutting up through the serried ranks like tiny black jackstraws. “_Bajak! Bajak!_” (“Pirates! Pirates!”) rose the excited yell forward, and there was a mad scramble of the crew to the waist for weapons. “Every lakatoi full of natives is a ‘pirate’ to these beggars,” laughed the curator. “They’ll probably prove hostile, though. Look to your guns, boys.” “Are you going to use the queer pistol, sir?” asked Dwight, curiously, slipping a clip of cartridges into the butt of his automatic. “Nope. Won’t need to this time,” smiled the curator. “Got to save it for something worse!” He strolled to the deck house and went inside.