It would be impossible to paint the despair that wrung her brother’s heart, as he stood with upturned face and eyes bent upon a scene in which he had no longer the power to take part.

Not much less intense was the agonised emotion of Murtagh; for little Helen was almost as dear to the Irishman as if she had been his own daughter.

Neither could have any other thought than that the child was lost beyond hope of recovery. She would either be torn to pieces by the claws of the monster, or by its great yellow teeth, already displayed to their view, and flung in mangled fragments to the ground. They actually stood for some time in expectation of seeing this sad catastrophe; and it would be vain to attempt any description of their emotions.

It was no relief when the two hunters came up, as they did at that instant, on their return from the chase. Their approach for the last two or three hundred yards had been hastened into a run by the shrieks of Helen and the shouts of Henry and Murtagh. Their arrival only added two new figures to the tableau of distress, and two voices to its expression.

The ape could still be seen through the foliage ascending to the top of the tree; but Captain Redwood felt that the rifle he held in his hands, though sure of aim and fatal in effect, was of no more use than if it had been a piece of wood.

Saloo had the same feeling in regard to his blow-gun. The rifle might send a deadly bullet through the skull of the gorilla, and the latter pierce its body with an arrow that would carry a quick-spreading poison through its veins.

But to what purpose, even though they could be certain of killing it? Its death would be also the death of the child. She was still living, and apparently unhurt; for they could see her moving, and hear her voice, as she was carried onward and upward in that horrible embrace.

Captain Redwood dared not send a bullet nor Saloo an arrow. Slight as the chances were of saving the girl, either would have made them slighter. A successful shot of the rifle or puff of the blow-gun would be as fatal to the abducted as the abductor; and the former, with or without the latter, would be certain to fall to the foot of the tree. It was a hundred feet sheer from the point which the ape had attained to the ground. The child would not only be killed, but crushed to a shapeless mass.

Ah me! what a terrible scene for her father! What a spectacle for him to contemplate!

And as he stood in unutterable agony, his companions gathered around, all helpless and irresolute as to how they should act, they saw the ape suddenly change his direction, and move outward from the trunk of the tree along one of its largest limbs. This trended off in a nearly horizontal direction, at its end interlocking with a limb of the neighbouring tree, which stretched out a............