could do was to wait in the mugginess
until, through a window in the sluggish clouds which hung low
overhead, the sun shot its rays and sucked up the moisture. Then
they started, and a minute later they were in the silence and the
gloom of the most tremendous extent of unbroken wood on the face of
the earth--a Sahara of leaves, stretching away to the east for five
hundred miles, and reaching over the same extent north and south.
Trackless, the forest was, to any one not acquainted with its
secrets; but there were paths through it, and the villagers had made
their own approaches to the main system of thoroughfares, so that
the going was not difficult, especially as the direction up to a
certain distance had been decided upon by the previous day's
tracking.

They had, however, to walk in single file, with much care to their
steps, for the obstacles were ceaseless in the way of trailing
vines, saplings, and fallen trees. The narrow and tortuous avenue
they threaded was gloomy in the extreme, affording scarcely any
glimpse of the sky, and opening out no vistas between the serried
ranks of steins, each clothed in a covering of velvet moss, and all
looped together by the parasitical vines, whose boles were often as
thick as cables.

As they plunged deeper into the woods over a yielding surface of
leaf-mould, which sent up a warm smell, the silence was as the
silence of a huge cavern, into which is borne the hollow rumbling of
the waves, the sound in place of that being the continual murmur of
the sea of leaves moved by a breeze ever so slight, so soft that no
chance breath of it found its way below.

Yet the place was not really silent, and by-and-by, as their ears
grew attuned to the new surroundings, the boys detected the sounds
made by living things large and small, far and near--sounds which
seemed a part of the silence, because they were all soft and a
little mysterious, with a pause in between, as if the insect or
creature which made them was listening to find if any enemy had
heard him. They were little detached sounds, as if an insect would
start out to sing its song, and then suddenly think better of it;
and even when some large animal made its presence known by the
snapping of a branch, or a sudden scurry in the undergrowth, the
noise ceased almost as soon as it began.

"It gives me the creeps," muttered Venning, after a long silence.

"That's just it," said Compton; "everything appears to be creeping."

"