I do not know that there is any necessity for me to describe the next
four days of our voyage in detail, further than to say that they were,
on the whole, the most miserable that I ever spent in my life, forming
one monotonous record of heavy labour, heat, misery, and mosquitoes. All
that dreary way we passed through a region of almost endless swamp, and
I can only attribute our escape from fever and death to the constant
doses of quinine and purgatives which we took, and the unceasing toil
which we were forced to undergo. On the third day of our journey up the
canal we had sighted a round hill that loomed dimly through the vapours
of the marsh, and on the evening of the fourth night, when we camped,
this hill seemed to be within five-and-twenty or thirty miles of us. We
were by now utterly exhausted, and felt as though our blistered hands
could not pull the boat a yard farther, and that the best thing that
we could do would be to lie down and die in that dreadful wilderness of
swamp. It was an awful position, and one in which I trust no other white
man will ever be placed; and as I threw myself down in the boat to sleep
the sleep of utter exhaustion, I bitterly cursed my folly in ever having
been a party to such a mad undertaking, which could, I saw, only end in
our death in this ghastly land. I thought, I remember, as I slowly sank
into a doze, of what the appearance of the boat and her unhappy crew
would be in two or three months' time from that night. There she would
lie, with gaping seams and half filled with fœtid water, which, when
the mist-laden wind stirred her, would wash backwards and forwards
through our mouldering bones, and that would be the end of her, and of
those in her who would follow after myths and seek out the secrets of
Nature.

Already I seemed to hear the water rippling against the desiccated bones
and rattling them together, rolling my skull against Mahomed's, and
his against mine, till at last Mahomed's stood straight up upon its