"What was Jessie doing all this time?" I ventured to ask him.

"Why, what was any one doing? She wasn't an anxiety of my department. I
suppose she was there for the only reason I had--because she asked for
it. It was the same next day, except that instead of more arrows we
found a python in the bunkers. Came aboard over the hawsers, I suppose.
We were a lively lunatic asylum below while killing it with fire-shovels
and crowbars. That was what the voyage was like. The whole lot of it
was the same, and you knew quite well that the farther you went the less
anything mattered. There were slight variations each day of snakes,
mosquitoes, and fevers, to keep you from feeling dead already."

"I've often wondered," I confessed, thinking to bring Hanson to something
I wanted to hear, "what happened to your company. Once we had a word of
Purdy, but never of Jessie or of you."

"Well, now I'm telling you. But you'd have been past wondering if you'd
been with us. Purdy wasn't companionable. He'd tell me it was hot. And
it was. You could feel that yourself. Jessie cooked our meals. Her
galley could have been only a shade better than the engine-room. She
began to look rather faded. At last I was the only one who hadn't been
down with fever. We crawled on and on, and the only question was where
we ourselves would end, for the forest and the river were never going to.
But you didn't care. I'd never been better in my life, and here was the
thing I'd always wanted to see. I could have gone on for ever like that,
wondering what we should see round the next corner.

"Our big troubles were to come. Up to then, we hadn't run into anything
really drastic after turning a corner. I suppose we had had about a