direct
road out of their unpleasant predicament. Here he met with an ample
reward for his trouble in climbing the tree, for he saw that, if they
pursued their way due south--as they could now do, directing their
course by the moon--they would have to travel through at least seven
miles of forest; whilst by heading in a south-westerly direction,
keeping the moon a little on their left hand, they would only have to
traverse some two miles of forest, after which there seemed to be
tolerably open ground as far as the eye could reach. About three miles
East-South-East of him he detected the gleaming white walls of a number
of buildings, which he judged to be a portion of the town of Santiago;
beyond it rose a curiously-shaped, double-coned mountain; away on his
right lay the table-land of Mariel; and--joyous sight--through a break
in the rising ground to the southward he caught a glimpse of the sea,
with, far away on the utmost verge of the horizon, an appearance of
land, which he conjectured must be the Isle of Pines. Noting all these
matters carefully, and making a rough mental sketch of "the lay of the
land," George rapidly descended to where he had left Tom and Walford,
and rapidly detailed to the former the result of his observations.

"We must be off at once," he explained, "for we have no time to spare;
we have lost nearly three good hours blundering about here blindly in
this wood; it must be now nearly or quite midnight; and, if so, it
leaves us only ten hours at most to reach the sea, if we are to do so
without being overtaken."

Accordingly, weary and stiff as they were, they again shouldered the
pole from which Walford in his hammock was slung, and once more set out
upon their journey, which, now that they were favoured by the light of
the moon, they hoped would be of a somewhat more prosperous character
than it had hitherto been.

Another painful and toilsome tramp of a couple of hours and they
emerged, to their unbounded joy, from the southern side of the forest on
to comparatively open ground. Trees and dense straggling clumps of bush
were still abundant enough--far too much so, in fact--but there were
wide patches of grass-land between, over which their progress was
tolerably rapid. Once clear of the thick timber, George again shaped
his course due south, intending to pass through the break in the rising
ground which he had seen from his lofty lookout; but somehow they missed
it, and this involved a g