week without coming across
a single human dwelling-place. All around, death seemed to be lurking
and lying in wait for him. Though his stomach was racked by hunger, he
often did not dare to eat the bright-coloured fruits which hung from the
trees; he was afraid to touch the glittering berries, fearing lest they
should be poisonous. For whole days he did not see a patch of sky, but
tramped on beneath a canopy of branches, amidst a greenish gloom that
swarmed with horrible living creatures. Great birds flew over his head
with a terrible flapping of wings and sudden strange calls resembling
death groans; apes sprang, wild animals rushed through the thickets
around him, bending the saplings and bringing down a rain of leaves, as
though a gale were passing. But it was particularly the serpents that
turned his blood cold when, stepping upon a matting of moving, withered
leaves, he caught sight of their slim heads gliding amidst a horrid maze
of roots. In certain nooks, nooks of dank shadow, swarming colonies
of reptiles--some black, some yellow, some purple, some striped, some
spotted, and some resembling withered reeds--suddenly awakened into life
and wriggled away. At such times the man would stop and look about for
a stone on which he might take refuge from the soft yielding ground
into which his feet sank; and there he would remain for hours,
terror-stricken on espying in some open space near by a boa, who,
with tail coiled and head erect, swayed like the trunk of a big tree
splotched with gold.

"At night he used to sleep in the trees, alarmed by the slightest
rustling of the branches, and fancying that he could hear endless swarms
of serpents gliding through the gloom. He almost stifled beneath the
interminable expanse of foliage. The gloomy shade reeked with close,
oppressive heat, a clammy dankness and pestilential sweat, impregnated
with the coarse aroma of scented wood and malodorous flowers.

"And when at last, after a long weary tramp, the man made his way out of
the forest and beheld the sky again, he found himself confronted by wide
rivers which barred his way. He skirted their banks, keeping a watchful
eye on the grey backs of the alligators and the masses of drifting
vegetation, and then, when he came to a less suspicious-looking spot,
he swam across. And beyond the rivers the forests began again. At other
times there were vast prairie lands, leagues of thick vegetation, in
which, at distant intervals, small