his some of
them did, but the majority gave way to despair; and if we had not lugged
one chap out he would have drowned himself.

"We had a long rest here, if rest you can call it when fellows felt
utterly burnt up with the heat, and so parched with thirst and famished
with hunger that their whole inside was all one gnawing crave for food
and drink; but it eased us a bit, and Magellan and I held a council of
war, as you might say, looking matters in the face and studying our
position.

"As near as I could judge from what I had observed when cruising off the
coast, we should have to cross three more mountains similar to the one
we had just got over, and travel through three more valleys like this in
the same way, before arriving within hail of Majunga; for I knew there
were three bays between Cape Tangan and the port we were aiming for--
Pasanda, Radama, and another whose name I forget. The question was,
would we ever get over the distance? If we did not meet with water
soon, it would be utterly impossible for us to accomplish the journey;
and, as the dry season had now set in, our chance of finding stray
rivulets and mountain streams would grow each day less and less--unless,
sir, you've ever been in the tropics you can't tell how quickly the
appearance of the country alters with the change of the season! A
place, one day, may be all foaming down with cataracts and mountain
torrents, with a river perhaps lying in your way that you would have to
swim through to get over to the other side of it; while, the next time
you visit the same locality, even within a week, the mountain torrents
and cataracts will have vanished as if by magic, and the river you had
to swim over or found impassable will now have dwindled down to a tiny
streamlet that a child could paddle in, or else have completely dried
up, leaving only a rocky channel in the ground with huge boulders tossed
about here and there to show where it had been.

"It was fortunate for us we had the sun to guide us through all this
forest waste, as otherwise we could not possibly have steered in any
constant direction, but would probably have gone round in a circle like
a horse in a mill. As it was, however, even amidst the depth of
brushwood and jungle by the side of the salt-water lagoon where we were
camping for the time, we could easily distinguish the western point of
the compass from the sun circling almost directly towards that quarter
after it had passed the