"Did ever man see such a thing before ?" There was no longer any doubt about the matter, which for my own part I confess perfectly appalled me.

There he sat, the dead man, whose directions, written some ten generations ago, had led us to this spot.
Here in my own hand was the rude pen with which he had written them, and about his neck hung the crucifix that his dying lips had kissed.
Gazing at him, my imagination could reconstruct the last scene of the drama, the traveller dying of cold and starvation, yet striving to convey to the world the great secret which he had discovered:--the awful loneliness of his death, of which the evidence sat before us.

It even seemed to me that I could trace in his strongly-marked features a likeness to those of my poor friend Silvestre his descendant, who had died twenty years before in my arms, but perhaps that was fancy.

At any rate, there he sat, a sad memento of the fate that so often overtakes those who would penetrate into the unknown; and there doubtless he will still sit, crowned with the dread majesty of death, for centuries yet unborn, to startle the eyes of wanderers like ourselves, if ever any such should come again to invade his loneliness.

The thing overpowered us, already almost perished as we were with cold and hunger.
"Let us go," said Sir Henry in a low voice; "stay, we will give him a companion," and lifting up the dead body of the Hottentot Ventvoegel, he placed it near to that of the old Dom.