. _Carruthers' Road._ 5. _Waterfall._
3. _Vailima Plantation House._ 6. _Banyan tree._]

At the top of the climb I made my way again to the watercourse; it is
here running steady and pretty full; strange these intermittencies--and
just a little below the main stream is quite dry, and all the original
brook has gone down some lava gallery of the mountain--and just a little
further below, it begins picking up from the left hand in little boggy
tributaries, and in the inside of a hundred yards has grown a brook
again.[30] The general course of the brook was, I guess, S.E.; the
valley still very deep and whelmed in wood. It seemed a swindle to have
made so sheer a climb and still find yourself at the bottom of a well.
But gradually the thing seemed to shallow, the trees to seem poorer and
smaller; I could see more and more of the silver sprinkles of sky among
the foliage, instead of the sombre piling up of tree behind tree. And
here I had two scares--first, away up on my right hand I heard a bull
low; I think it was a bull from the quality of the low, which was
singularly songful and beautiful; the bulls belong to me, but how did I
know that the bull was aware of that? and my advance guard not being at
all properly armed, we advanced with great precaution until I was
satisfied that I was passing eastward of the enemy. It was during this
period that a pool of the river suddenly boiled up in my face in a
little fountain. It was in a very dreary, marshy part among dilapidated
trees that you see through holes in the trunks of; and if any kind of
beast or elf or devil had come out of that sudden silver ebullition, I
declare I do not think I should have been surprised. It was perhaps a
thing as curious--a fish, with which these head waters of the stream
are alive. They are some of them as long as my finger, should be easily
caught in these shallows, and some day I'll have a dish of them.

Very soon after I came to where the stream collects in another banana
swamp, with the bananas bearing well. Beyond, the course is again quite
dry; it mounts with a sharp turn a very steep face of the mountain, and
then stops abruptly at the lip of a plateau, I suppose the top of Vaea
mountain: plainly no more springs here--there was no smallest furrow of
a watercourse beyond--and my task might be said to be accomplished. But
such is the animated spirit in the service that the whole advance guard
expressed a sentiment of disappo