forded by the strong current to endeavour
to pass ahead of us and cut off our retreat; but in the eagerness of
their pursuit they seemed to lose sight of this advantage, for they
continued to head straight for us, while we, impelled by the full
strength of our thirty paddles, now plied with desperate energy by our
freely perspiring crew, gradually drew out and threw our pursuers still
further on our quarter. Yet they were steadily nearing us, and I did
not see how we could scrape clear without something in the nature of a
fight.

All this time we were heading straight for a low, heavily timbered point
which marked another turn in the course of the stream, and I could see
that our people were straining every nerve to get round this point
before being overtaken. At length, with a mighty stirring up of the mud
by our deep-plunging paddles in the shallow water, we shaved close round
this point and almost immediately afterwards darted into a narrow creek
so completely overgrown with vegetation that the boughs of the mangroves
and other trees united over our heads, forming a sort of tunnel, the
interior of which was so opaquely dark that it was scarcely possible to
see one's hand before one's face. Yet our helmsman seemed to know the
place perfectly, for he stood boldly on, urging the crew to continue
their exertions. At length, after we had traversed a full hundred yards
or more of the creek, we sighted a spot ahead where, doubtless in
consequence of a wind-fall, or some similar phenomenon, the dense bush
had been levelled, leaving room for a patch of clear moonlight, some ten
yards in circumference, to fall full upon the channel of the creek,
revealing every object, even the smallest, within its boundary with a
clearness and distinctness that was positively startling. Arrived here,
the canoe was sheered in alongside a spot where the mangroves grew
thickly, and some twenty of our crew, laying in their paddles, hastily
seized their bows and arrows and, springing ashore, swiftly vanished
into the adjacent deep shadow, while the canoe, with the remainder of us
on board, pushed across the patch of moonlight into the darkness beyond,
where she was forced beneath an overhanging mass of foliage, in such a
manner as to lie perfectly concealed.

Hardly had this been accomplished when we heard from the river the
exclamations of our pursuers, startled at our sudden and, at first,
inexplicable disappearance. But it did not long r