e other
craft, and leaving the latter moored to the bank, they joyfully shoved
off, and three minutes later were in the main stream, with the canoe's
head pointed up the river.

Meanwhile, the storm still raged as furiously as ever, the flashes of
lightning were incessant, the rolling of the thunder was continuous and
deafening, and the northerly wind was blowing so fiercely that the
surface of the stream was whipped into small, foam-capped waves. But
they were not high enough to imperil the safety of the canoe, moreover
the wind that roared so savagely aloft among the tree-tops and stripped
off the dried leaves and rotten branches in blinding showers was a fair
wind for the fugitives, so they stepped their mast, close-reefed their
sail, and were presently foaming up the river in midstream--where,
although they had a strong current to contend with, they were at least
safe from the branches that flew hurtling through the air--as fast as a
horse could trot.

Now, all this time the storm had been a dry storm, that is to say, not a
drop of rain had fallen from the bosom of the scowling clouds that
seemed bursting with it, but it was bound to come, sooner or later, and
come it did, with a vengeance, when our friends had been under way about
an hour, and just as the canoe had shot into a broad, lagoon-like
stretch of the river where it broadened out to about a mile in width,
and where consequently the water was shallow and the current scarcely
perceptible. And well was it for them that the rain caught them just at
that point, for otherwise they must perforce have landed until the worst
of it had blown over. For it came down, not in the sober, steady,
respectable fashion in which it falls in temperate climates, but
literally in sheets, through which it was not possible to see anything
more distant than an ordinary boat's length. With it came more wind, so
that the canoe, with the gale right behind her and a close-reefed sail
set which, in that condition, was not very much bigger than a man's
shirt, rushed along with the foam boiling up level with her gunwale, and
sometimes even in over it. While this state of affairs prevailed, and
nothing could be seen beyond the dripping sail glistening in the flash
of the lightning, the Englishmen continued their headlong flight up the
river, unable to see where they were steering but keeping the boat
steadily dead before the wind, confident, from the glimpse they had had
just before