“Jerry! Ned! Bob! Wake up, everyone! Don’t go to sleep!”
“Because we have landed in a thicket of the bushes of death!”
“The bushes of death?” asked Jerry, almost too sleepy to know what he was saying. “What are they?”
“Bushes that give off a peculiar odor,” answered the scientist. “It is death to breathe it--death by a slow languor that begins with a sleep. No wonder the Indians avoid this end of the valley. It is death to sleep here! We must all keep awake until morning, and then move to some other location. Wake up, everyone!” and he began shaking the sleepers vigorously, for they all were stretched out, with closed eyes. The bushes of death had already begun to exert an influence over them.
Though Professor Snodgrass worked desperately to keep his companions awake, he was at a disadvantage, for he, too, was beginning to feel the influence of the unseen but deadly bushes. His eyes were heavy, and his feet began to lag as he hurried about the cabin, shaking first one and then another of the men or boys.
“Wake up, Bob--Jerry!” he cried, but Bob only answered as he fell back in his bunk:
“Oh, let me alone! I’m so sleepy and tired!”
“Yes,” murmured the scientist, “but it means rest forever if you sleep now! Wake up!” and he punched Bob vigorously.
The professor himself was fighting like a Trojan to ward off sleep.
“I must do something to save them--save myself,” he thought, as he looked on Tod and Nestor, both slumbering heavily, while it seemed that Jerry’s breathing was already becoming less vigorous as the deadly fumes overcame him. “I can’t move the airship alone,” thought the scientist, “and it would hardly be safe to do so in the darkness. Yet I must take some action. If there was only some way of overcoming the fumes, or making them less harmful----” he paused suddenly in his musing. His scientific mind was at work. Already he was recalling what he knew of the fatal bushes. He had once analyzed the juice from them, for it was from the sap that the exhalation came, carrying death. The bushes only gave off the odor at night. In the day they were harmless.
“I must make some other kind of fumes that will neutralize those of the bushes of death,” reasoned Professor Snodgrass. “Let me see what will be the most effective.”