His spirits rose as his eye lit on it, and he pushed his way under the great bole with ready shotgun, for he could not tell how many jungle dwellers might have camped under it during the storm. A grand scampering and creeping rustled the dry leaves under the trunk, but it soon stopped and the flashlight showed the cavelike space all clear. Dwight shouldered his way into it, and at once cleared a space for a fire and began peeling off strips of dry bark from the under side of the tree. Blessed, blessed fire! The one human thing in all this dark jungle! That was the turning point in his mental distress, for dejection gave way to cheerfulness, wandering homelessness to a hearth and a campfire. Soon the warmth of its small blaze penetrated even his chilled bones, and it and the quinine gradually drove off his fever. Dwight waited out the night under the trunk, trying the cave man’s posture of sleep, squatting on his hams with his head resting on arms crossed over his knees (still used by the hill men of India and by many tribes of the Malay Archipelago). He found it not so bad, even though irksome to a white man’s heel tendon. Keeping the fire going with bark and small branches broken from the tree trunk, he gradually dried out, and at length there came the dawn of another day and the jungle awoke to life. Starting off by compass again, he steered due west, bound in time to strike the brook. It was not for an hour more of traveling that the jungle began to lighten on ahead, and bits of sky, glimpses of mountain side, and the tops of low trees told him he was coming to where the brook skirted the plateau. Dense, thorny underbrush began to block his way now, and beyond it came the rippling murmur of the stream. He shouted for the curator and his party, hoping that he was near enough to camp for his voice to be heard. No answer came, except the sough of the wind over the grasses and bushes of the plateau, so Dwight decided to get out into the open and study the mountains for something familiar. He forced his way to the stream-side and jumped across. He discovered, from the familiar headlands of the mountain chain, that he was some distance above camp. It seemed well to fire another signal in the open, and he was about to do so when three large birds as big as ostriches jumped from the grass in the swales and began to run, making a scraping, cackling noise something like the wild brush turkey. “Cassowaries!” exclaimed Dwight, thrilling with adventure again as his gun sprang to shoulder. They were running like deer, their red, wattled heads and bright-blue necks stretched out ahead like giant chickens. His shotgun held only sixes, so Dwight aimed for the speeding head of the nearest cassowary as at a flying quail, swinging ahead and firing like a wing shot.