A DRAMATIC EPISODE 
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boos—always steadily climbing. The trail was 
fairly good and our progress was encouraging. 
There were many elephant pits in the bamboo 
forest, but they were all ancient ones, half-filled 
with decayed leaves and obviously unused for half 
a century or more. From some of them fairly large¬ 
sized trees had grown. Sometimes in the midst of 
these great, silent, light-green forests we came upon 
giant trees, tangled and gnarled, with trunks 
twenty or thirty feet in circumference. In vain we 
looked for the impassable trail the natives had 
warned us to expect. 
Late in the afternoon we came to a wonderful 
cave, over the mouth of which a wonderful fan¬ 
shaped waterfall dropped seventy feet or more. 
My aneroid barometer indicated an elevation of 
eighty-two hundred feet, showing that we had 
climbed twenty-seven hundred feet since morning. 
We found a little clearing in the bamboo forest 
and pitched our tents on ground that sloped down 
like the roof of a house. The clearing was barely 
fifty yards long, yet our twenty or more tents were 
pitched, our horses tethered in the middle, and the 
camp-fires crackled merrily as the chill air of night 
came down upon us. From the forest came the mul¬ 
titude of sounds that told of strange birds and ani¬ 
mals that were out on their nocturnal hunt for food. 
Early in the morning the safari was sent on with 
the guides while we remained to explore the cave. 
It was an immense cavern, with an entrance hall, or 
foyer, about thirty feet high and a hundred feet in 
