e dissuaded. "I am an old traveller," said he. "This
is a foul jungle indeed; but we shall soon be at an end."

"Ay," said I, looking at him with a strange smile, "what end?"

Thereupon he laughed again and again, but not very heartily; and then,
perceiving that the path began to widen and grow higher, "There!" said
he. "What did I tell you? We are past the worst."

Indeed, we had now come to the bayou, which was in that place very
narrow and bridged across by a fallen trunk; but on either hand we could
see it broaden out, under a cavern of great arms of trees and hanging
creepers: sluggish, putrid, of a horrible and sickly stench, floated on
by the flat heads of alligators, and its banks alive with scarlet crabs.

"If we fall from that unsteady bridge," said I, "see, where the caiman
lies ready to devour us! If, by the least divergence from the path, we
should be snared in a morass, see, where those myriads of scarlet vermin
scour the border of the thicket! Once helpless, how they would swarm
together to the assault! What could man do against a thousand of such
mailed assailants? And what a death were that, to perish alive under
their claws!"

"Are you mad, girl?" he cried. "I bid you be silent and lead on."

Again I looked upon him, half relenting; and at that he raised the stick
that was in his hand and cruelly struck me on the face. "Lead on!" he
cried again. "Must I be all day, catching my death in this vile slough,
and all for a prating slave-girl?"

I took the blow in silence, I took it smiling; but the blood welled back
upon my heart. Something, I know not what, fell at that moment with a
dull plunge in the waters of the lagoon, and I told myself it was my
pity that had fallen.

On the farther side, to which we now hastily scrambled, the wood was not
so dense, the web of creepers not so solidly convolved. It was possible,
here and there, to mark a patch of somewhat brighter daylight, or to
distinguish, through the lighter web of parasites, the proportions of
some soaring tree. The cypress on the left stood very visibly forth,
upon the edge of such a clearing; the path in that place widened
broadly; and there was a patch of open ground, beset with horrible
ant-heaps, thick with their artificers. I laid down the tools and basket
by the cypress root, where they were instantly blackened over with the
crawling ants; and looked once more in the face of my unconscious
victim. Mosquitoes and foul flies wove so c