“Here!” cried Mark again wearily.
“Oh, there you are—are you?” cried the little sailor, struggling at last to his side. “I thought I was never going to get back. More you tries to find your way, more you loses it. I never see such a mess in my life! Why don’t they keep a gardener?”
Wretched as he was, hot, weary, and smarting and stinging from scratches and pricks, Mark could not help laughing at the little sailor’s irritable manner.
“Ah, you may laugh, my lad, a-lying all so comfortable there! but if you’d had such a slip as I did off a rock, and came down sitting on a thorn as big as a marlin’-spike, you wouldn’t show your white teeth like that!”
“But I did, Billy,” cried Mark, going off into a wild roar of laughter; “and I’m horribly pricked and torn. But never mind that. Did you find the way back to them?”
“Find your way back to ’em?—no. I never see such a muddle as the place is in. Every bit’s like every other bit; and when you mark down one tree, meaning to come back to it, and do come back to it, why it’s another tree just like the one you thought it was. I say, Mr Mark, sir, this place aren’t ’chanted—is it?”
“Enchanted!—no. Why?”
“I d’know, only it’s very queer like and puzzling. I can’t make it out a bit.”
“Why, how do you mean?”
“Mean as you can’t seem to box the compass like, and don’t know which way to steer, sir. I feels as if I should give it up.”