Also the projecting rocks in the place were covered with great pieces of snake skin, doubtless rubbed off by the reptile when once a year it changed its coat.
For a while we gazed at the loathsome and still glittering creature, then pushed on fearful lest we should stumble upon more of its kind.
I suppose that it must have been solitary, a kind of serpent rogue, as Jana was an elephant rogue, for we met none and, if the information which I obtained afterwards may be believed, there was no species at all resembling it in the country.

What its origin may have been I never learned.

All the Kendah could or would say about it was that it had lived in this hole from the beginning and that Black Kendah prisoners, or malefactors, were sometimes given to it to kill, as White Kendah prisoners were given to Jana.
The cave itself proved to be not very long, perhaps one hundred and fifty feet, no more.

It was not an artificial but a natural hollow in the lava rock, which I suppose had once been blown through it by an outburst of steam.

Towards the farther end it narrowed so much that I began to fear there might be no exit.