at dusk with his rifle, and I, very foolishly, was induced to
accompany him. There is something most uncanny in these tracts of
swamp at nightfall. The twisted, distorted trees, the gleaming,
evil-smelling pools of water, and the immense, snake-like lianes
hanging from the branches all give one a curious sense of unreality,
especially on a moonlight night. It is like a Gustave Dore drawing of a
bewitched forest. The Guardsman splashed about in the shallow water,
but never a sign of an alligator did we see. Giant tortoises crawled
lazily about, just visible in the half-light under the trees;
innumerable land-crabs scurried to and fro, and unclean reptiles
pattered over the fetid ooze, but we saw no more alligators than we
should have seen in St. James's Park.

There was a little group of coral islands, decked with plumes of
cocoa-nut palms, on the other side of the bay, close to a great
mangrove swamp, and the Guardsman insisted on our hiring a boat and
rowing out there, blazing though the sun was. These mangrove swamps
are evil-looking places. The mangrove, the only tree, I believe, that
actually grows in salt water, has unnaturally green leaves. The trees
grow on things like stilts, digging their roots deep into the foul
slime. When the tide is out, these stilts stand grey and naked below
the canopy of vivid greenery, and amongst them obscene, crab-like
things crawl over the festering black ooze. The water in the labyrinth
of channels between the mangroves was thick and discoloured; there was
not a breath of air, the heat was unbearable, and the whole place
steamed with decay and disease.

Yet somehow the scene seemed very familiar, for one had read of it,
again and again, in a hundred boys' books. The same mental process was
at work both in myself and in Joss, but it took different forms. I