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372 ignition the zone of flame which encircled me had become a roaring furnace, giving out an amount of heat that was already scarcely endurable, while fresh supplies of wood were being thrown upon the blazing pile, and the savages were pushing it slowly inward toward me with long poles.

Another ten minutes and I could tell by the smell that my clothing was scorching on my body, while the skin of my face and hands began to blister here and there under the influence of the fierce heat that now played upon me, and the air that I breathed burnt my nostrils like flame. The tom-toms were still being furiously beaten, the lightning was flashing and quivering continuously athwart the black heavens, and the thunder was booming overhead like the salvoes of artillery from hostile fleets in close action, but I was only dimly conscious of it all. I had attention for but one thing—the fierce, intolerable heat that played about me, searing my eyeballs, and leaping toward me in long, crackling tongues of roaring flame that momentarily threatened to envelop me as a garment.

I was tottering upon the very verge of insensibility—or was it death?—when I was aroused by the splashing of a few heavy drops of delicious coolness upon my upturned, blistering face; another breathless moment, during which a terrific flash of sun-bright lightning clove the darkness and dimmed even the fierce light of the flames that encompassed me, and down came the rain in true tropical style, a perfect cascade of sweet, tepid water that in an instant drenched me to the skin, and revived me as though the shower had been the very elixir of life. I opened my mouth and allowed the blessed drops to fall upon my cracked lips and parched tongue; and so great was the refreshment of them that I actually forgot the fire that roared and crackled and hissed about me! In a moment I found myself enveloped in a dense cloud of steam, through which the leaping flames flickered and