These orders had just been obeyed, and we were gliding along in absolute silence, when, a short distance ahead, I caught sight of a break in the mangroves that looked wide enough to admit the boat, and I signed to the coxswain to point our stem for it.  A few seconds later we slid into a kind of cavern, formed of the overarching branches of a belt of mangroves, and, gliding along a narrow canal of about sixty feet in length, we finally brought up alongside a good firm bank of soil, on which there was room enough for us all to land.  Our movements were effectually masked by a thin belt of scrub, which appeared to be all that intervened between us and the three or four hundred yelling and chanting natives who were now making the air ring and vibrate within a short hundred yards of us.  At the same time I became aware that the agonising shrieks, as of one in mortal agony, had ceased.