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Being fond of Verkimier, and knowing his desire to obtain a full-grown orang-utan, Gurulam went off early next morning to search for one.
Such were a few of the thoughts that burned but found no utterance. The last thought however led to action. Verkimier, foolish man! was a smoker. He carried fusees. Slowly, with no more apparent motion than the hour-hand on the face of a watch, he let his hand glide into his coat-pocket and took out the box of fusees.
Next morning Nigel entered the forest under the guidance of Verkimier and the Dyak youth, and the orang-utan, which followed like a dog, and sometimes even took hold of its master's arm and walked with him as if it had been a very small human being. It was a new experience to Nigel to walk in the sombre shade beneath the tangled arches of the wilderness.
Come now; eat, an' ve vill go to vork again. Ve must certainly find zee booterflies somevere before night." But Verkimier was wrong.
It was a huge building composed largely of bamboo wooden-planks and wicker-work, with a high thatched roof, and it stood, like all the other houses, on posts formed of great tree-stems which rose eight or ten feet from the ground. "You have frunds here too, I zink," said Verkimier to the hermit, as they ascended the ladder leading to the door of the hall.
The tiger threw one indescribable somersault and fell fell so promptly that it blocked the mouth of the pit, all the covering earth of which had been blown away by the shot, and Verkimier could feel the hairy side of the creature, and hear the beating of its heart as it gasped its life away. But in his cramped position he could not push it aside.
The creature looked helplessly incapable, pitifully unwilling, scratching its side the while. Evidently it was a lazy monkey. "Do you hear?" said Verkimier, sternly. The orang moved uneasily, but still declined to go. Turning sharply on it, the professor bent down, placed a hand on each of his knees and stared through the blue goggles into the animal's face. This was more than it could stand.
"To safe me!" exclaimed Verkimier, with a look of surprise which was greatly intensified by the rotundity of the blue spectacles. "Vell, I don't feel to vant safing joost at present." "It is not that danger threatens you so much as your friend the Rajah," returned the hermit. "But if he falls, all under his protection fall along with him.
About once in every three years, and sometimes oftener, the crops of coffee, bananas, rice, etcetera, in this region are quite destroyed by sulphur-rain, which covers everything for miles around the crater." "Hah! it vould be too hote a place zis for us, if zat vas to happin joost now," remarked Verkimier with a smile. "It cannot be far off the time now, I should think," said Van der Kemp.
"Zat is zee pitcher-plant," said Verkimier, as Nigel stopped suddenly before a plant which he had often read of but never seen.
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