id Amyas. So in they went.

They towed the ship up about half-a-mile to a point where she could not
be seen from the seaward; and there moored her to the mangrove-stems.
Amyas ordered a boat out, and went up the river himself to reconnoitre.
He rowed some three miles, till the river narrowed suddenly, and was all
but covered in by the interlacing boughs of mighty trees. There was no
sign that man had been there since the making of the world.

He dropped down the stream again, thoughtfully and sadly. How many years
ago was it that he passed this river's mouth? Three days. And yet how
much had passed in them! Don Guzman found and lost--Rose found and
lost--a great victory gained, and yet lost--perhaps his ship lost--above
all, his brother lost.

Lost! O God, how should he find his brother?

Some strange bird out of the woods made mournful answer--"Never, never,
never!"

How should he face his mother?

"Never, never, never!" wailed the bird again; and Amyas smiled bitterly,
and said "Never!" likewise.

The night mist began to steam and wreathe upon the foul beer-colored
stream. The loathy floor of liquid mud lay bare beneath the mangrove
forest. Upon the endless web of interarching roots great purple crabs
were crawling up and down. They would have supped with pleasure upon
Amyas's corpse; perhaps they might sup on him after all; for a heavy
sickening graveyard smell made his heart sink within him, and his
stomach heave; and his weary body, and more weary soul, gave themselves
up helplessly to the depressing influence of that doleful place.
The black bank of dingy leathern leaves above his head, the endless
labyrinth of stems and withes (for every bough had lowered its own
living cord, to take fresh hold of the foul soil below); the web of
roots, which stretched away inland till it was lost in the shades of
evening--all seemed one horrid complicated trap for him and his; and
even where, here and there, he passed the mouth of a lagoon, there was
no opening, no relief--nothing but the dark ring of mangroves, and here
and there an isolated group of large and small, parents and children,
breeding and spreading, as if in hideous haste to choke out air and sky.
Wailing sadly, sad-colored mangrove-hens ran off across the mud into the
dreary dark. The hoarse night-raven, hid among the roots, startled the
voyagers with a sudden shout, and then all was again silent as a grave.
The loathly alligators, lounging in the slime, l