mmy-apples four
and five feet high. It was a dark day in the rainy season, and now there
came squalls that tore off the leaves and sent them flying, and now it
was all still as in a house. It was in one of these still times that a
whole gang of birds and flying foxes came pegging out of the bush like
creatures frightened. Presently after she heard a rustle nearer hand,
and saw, coming out of the margin of the trees, among the mummy-apples,
the appearance of a lean grey old boar. It seemed to think as it came,
like a person; and all of a sudden, as she looked at it coming, she was
aware it was no boar, but a thing that was a man with a man's thoughts.
At that she ran, and the pig after her, and as the pig ran it holla'd
aloud, so that the place rang with it.

"I wish I had been there with my gun," said I. "I guess that pig would
have holla'd so as to surprise himself."

But she told me a gun was of no use with the like of these, which were
the spirits of the dead.

Well, this kind of talk put in the evening, which was the best of it;
but of course it didn't change my notion, and the next day, with my gun
and a good knife, I set off upon a voyage of discovery. I made, as near
as I could, for the place where I had seen Case come out; for if it was
true he had some kind of establishment in the bush I reckoned I should
find a path. The beginning of the desert was marked off by a wall to
call it so, for it was more of a long mound of stones. They say it
reaches right across the island, but how they know it is another
question, for I doubt if anyone has made the journey in a hundred years,
the natives sticking chiefly to the sea, and their little colonies along
the coast, and that part being mortal high and steep and full of cliffs.
Up to the west side of the wall the ground has been cleared, and there
are cocoa-palms and mummy-apples and guavas, and lots of sensitive. Just
across, the bush begins outright; high bush at that, trees going up like
the masts of ships, and ropes of liana hanging down like a ship's
rigging, and nasty orchids growing in the forks like funguses. The
ground where there was no underwood looked to be a heap of boulders. I
saw many green pigeons which I might have shot, only I was there with a
different idea. A number of butterflies flopped up and down along the
ground like dead leaves; sometimes I would hear a bird calling,
sometimes the wind overhead, and always the sea along the coast.

But the qu