“What about the forest? Is it far back from the waterside?”
“Hangs over it, so that one can send a boat ashore every night with a cable to make fast to one of the great trees, and save letting down and getting up the anchor.”
“But about the river itself: can you take the brig up far—no rocks, shoals, or waterfalls?”
“Nothing of the kind, sir,” said the captain. “It’s all deep, muddy, sluggish water running through a great forest, and I should say it carries off the drainage of hundreds of miles of country. It must come from the mountains right away yonder, and sometimes there must be tremendous rains to flood the stream, for I remember seeing marks of sand and weeds and dry slime thirty or forty feet up some of the trunks, and I should say that at times the whole country’s flooded and we shall have to look out to keep from grounding right away from the river’s course.”
“You will take care of that,” said Sir Humphrey, smiling.
“I shall try, sir,” said the captain grimly, “for I don’t think you’d like to wake up some morning and find the brig in the middle of a forest, waiting till the next flood-time came.”
A week later, after being baffled again and again by adverse winds, Brace and his brother stood upon the deck of the brig one evening just as the wind dropped, as if simultaneously with the descent of the sun like a huge globe of orange fire behind a bank of trees a hundred yards to their left. The river, smooth and glassy, glowed in reflection from the ruddy sky, the sails flapped, and, no longer answering to her helm, the vessel was beginning slowly to yield to the sluggish current, when there was a rattling sound as the chain cable ran through the hawse-hole, and directly after the anchor took hold in the muddy bottom, the way on the brig was checked, and she swung in mid-stream with her bowsprit pointing out the direction of her future course—a long open waterway between two rapidly-darkening banks of trees whose boughs drooped over and dipped their muddied tips in the stream.
“Will this do, squire?” said the captain.
“Gloriously,” said Brace; “but I thought you meant to make fast every night to one of the trees.”
“By-and-by, my lad, by-and-by, when there’s a handy tree. This would be bad landing for a boat—all one tangle of jungle, and hard to get through. You wanted to get where it was wild: hear that?”