vines; skirting cliffs by the aid of tangled and interlaced roots
of rank, wet vegetation; and then down again into river bottoms,
where the tenacious mud challenged their every step, and the streams
became an interminable morass, through which passage was possible
only by jumping from root to root, where the gnarled feeders of the
great trees projected above the bottomless ooze. The persecution
of the _jejenes_ became diabolical. At dawn and sunset the raucous
bellow of the red-roarer monkeys made the air hideous. The
flickering lights of the forest became dismally depressing. The men
grew morose and sullen. Reed and Harris quarreled with each other on
the slightest provocation.

Then, to increase their misery, came the rain. It fell upon them in
the river bottoms in fierce, driving gusts; then in sheets that
blotted out the forest and wet their very souls. The heavens split
with the lightning. The mountains roared and trembled with the hideous
cannonade of thunder. The jungle-matted hills ran with the flood. An
unvaried pall of vapor hung over the steaming ground, through which
uncanny, phantasmagoric shapes peered at the struggling little band.

Again the sun burst forth, and a fiery vapor seethed above the moist
earth. The reek of their damp clothing and the acrid odor of the wet
soil increased the enervation of their hard travel. Again and again
the peevish Harris accused Rosendo of having lost the way. The old man
patiently bore the abuse. Reed chided Harris, and at length quarreled
violently with him, although his own apprehension waxed continually
greater. Carmen said little. Hour after hour she toiled along,
floundering through the bogs, fording the deeper streams on Rosendo's
broad back, whispering softly to him at times, often seizing and
pressing his great horny hand, but holding her peace. In vain at
evening, when gathered about the damp, smudging firewood, Harris would
bring up to her the causes of her flight. In vain he would accuse the
unfortunate Alcalde, the Bishop, the soldiers. Carmen refused to lend
ear to it, or to see in it anything more than a varied expression of
the human mind. Personality was never for a moment considered. She
saw, not persons, not things, but expressions of thought in the
phenomena which had combined to urge her out of her former environment
and cast her into the trackless jungle.

At length, one day, when it seemed to the exhausted travelers that
human endurance could s