Suddenly a sharp hissing was heard.
The compressed air escaped—but a ray of daylight filtered through the wall.
The water only rose eight inches, and stopped, without Dick Sand being obliged to close the hole.
The equilibrium was established between the level within and that outside.
The summit of the cone emerged.
Mrs. Weldon and her companions were saved.
At once, after a frantic hurra, in which Hercules's thundering voice prevailed, the cutlasses were put to work.
The summit, quickly attacked, gradually crumbled. The hole was enlarged, the pure air entered in waves, and with it the first rays of the rising sun.
The top once taken off the cone, it would be easy to hoist themselves on to its wall, and they would devise means of reaching some neighboring height, above all inundations.
Dick Sand first mounted to the summit of the cone.
A cry escaped him.
That particular noise, too well known by African travelers, the whizzing of arrows, passed through the air.
Dick Sand had had time to perceive a camp a hundred feet from the ant-hill, and ten feet from the cone, on the inundated plain, long boats, filled with natives.
It was from one of those boats that the flight of arrows had come the moment the young novice's head appeared out of the hole.
Dick Sand, in a word, had told all to his companions.
Seizing his gun, followed by Hercules, Acteon, and Bat, he reappeared at the summit of the cone, and all fired on one of the boats.
Several natives fell, and yells, accompanied by shots, replied to the detonation of the fire-arms.
But what could Dick Sand and his companions do against a hundred Africans, who surrounded them on all sides?
The ant-hill was assailed.
Mrs. Weldon, her child, and Cousin Benedict, all were brutally snatched from it, and without having had time to speak to each other or to shake hands for the last time, they saw themselves separated from each other, doubtless in virtue of orders previously given. A last boat took away Mrs. Weldon, little Jack and Cousin Benedict.
Dick Sand saw them disappear in the middle of the camp.
As to him, accompanied by Nan, Old Tom, Hercules, Bat, Acteon and Austin, he was thrown into a second boat, which went toward another point of the hill.
Twenty natives entered this boat. It was followed by five others.
Resistance was not possible, and nevertheless, Dick Sand and his companions attempted it.
Some soldiers of the caravan were wounded by them, and certainly they would have paid for this resistance with their lives, if there had not been a formal order to spare them.
In a few minutes, the passage was made.
But just as the boat landed, Hercules, with an irresistible bound, sprang on the ground.
Two natives having sprung on him, the giant turned his gun like a club, and the natives fell, with their skulls broken.
A moment after, Hercules disappeared under the cover of the trees, in the midst of a shower of balls, as Dick Sand and his companions, having been put on land, were chained like slaves.
CHAPTER VII.
IN CAMP ON THE BANKS OF THE COANZA.
The aspect of the country was entirely changed since the inundation. It had made a lake of the plain where the termite village stood.
The cones of twenty ant-hills emerged, and formed the only projecting points on this large basin.
The Coanza had overflowed during the night, with the waters of its tributaries swelled by the storm.
This Coanza, one of the rivers of Angola, flows into the Atlantic, a hundred miles from the cape where the
"Pilgrim" was wrecked.
It was this river that Lieutenant Cameron had to cross some years later, before reaching Benguela.
The Coanza is intended to become the vehicle for the interior transit of this portion of the Portuguese colony.
Already steamers ascend its lower course, and before ten years elapse, they will ply over its upper bed.
Dick Sand had then acted wisely in seeking some navigable river toward the north.
The rivulet he had followed had just been emptied into the Coanza.
Only for this sudden attack, of which he had had no intimation to put him on his guard, he would have found the Coanza a mile farther on.
His companions and he would have embarked on a raft, easily constructed, and they would have had a good chance to descend the stream to the Portuguese villages, where the steamers come into port. There, their safety would be secured.
It would not be so.
The camp, perceived by Dick Sand, was established on an elevation near the ant-hill, into which fate had thrown him, as in a trap.
At the summit of that elevation rose an enormous sycamore fig-tree, which would easily shelter five hundred men under its immense branches.
Those who have not seen those giant trees of Central Africa, can form no idea of them.
Their branches form a forest, and one could be lost in it.
Farther on, great banyans, of the kind whose seeds do not change into fruits, completed the outline of this vast landscape.
It was under the sycamore's shelter, hidden, as in a mysterious asylum, that a whole caravan—the one whose arrival Harris had announced to Negoro—had just halted.