rest and strapped the load on my shoulders.

We parted with the other three men before sunrise, with clasps of the
hand that were never to be repeated, and so turned our faces toward
the outer world. My only hope was to retain sufficient strength in
my emaciated, fever-racked body to drag myself back to Floresta, and
from there, in the course of time, get canoe or launch connection
to the frontier down the river, and then wait for the steamer that
would take me back to "God's Country," where I could eat proper food,
and rest--rest.

The jungle no longer seemed beautiful or wonderful to me, but
horrible--a place of terror and death.

In my drug-dazed sleep on that back-track, I started up in my hammock,
bathed in a sweat of fear from a dream; I saw myself and my companions
engulfed in a sea of poisonous green, caught by living creepers
that dragged us down and held us in a deadly octopus embrace. The
forest was something from which I fled; it was hideous, a trap, with
its impenetrable wall of vegetation, its dark shadows, and moist,
treacherous ground.

I longed for the open; struggled for it, as the swimmer struggles up
for air to escape from the insidious sucking of the undertow.

Starving, weak from fever, oppressed by the thought of death, but
lashed on by stimulants and the tenacity of life, I headed with my
two comrades out of the world of the unknown, toward the world of
men--to _Life_.