They had covered, he guessed, between twelve and fifteen miles, when Nahnya called a halt. They were in a little stretch of grass fringing a still streamlet.
"We stop here till midnight," she said. "All will sleep."
Ralph awoke about sunset to find that he and Charley were alone in camp. His heart winced, remembering the other times she had stolen away from camp and he had followed her. This time he did not go. Soon he saw her coming back in the trail with an axe upon her shoulder. He thought that her footsteps dragged, and that her face betrayed an unutterable, sad weariness. Rising quickly, he found he was mistaken. It was the old, walled face that she showed him.
"We start in five hours," she said quietly. "Sleep some more." She lay down at a little distance.
It was very dark when they arose and made up their packs. Continuing on the trail they were obliged to keep close together. Presently they commenced to zigzag down a long hill where the trail was much broken and washed by rain. Ralph, putting his feet into holes, and catching his toes on exposed roots, made but rough going of it. They reached the bottom at last, and the trail became good again, but Nahnya, who was leading, presently struck off from it, and they crossed a wide meadow, their moccasins swishing through the grass.
The sky was heavily overclouded. Ralph could barely make out Nahnya close ahead; everything else was swallowed up in the thick darkness. Nevertheless Nahnya seemed to know exactly where they were. At a certain point in the grass, without any distinguishing features that Ralph could see, she stopped, saying:
"We wait here till it is light. You can sleep if you want."
Dawn brought another dramatic surprise: They were resting almost at the edge of a steep declivity of earth, and two hundred feet below moved another great, smooth, swift stream, its eddying surface gleaming in the gathering light like creased satin, or as if the water were flowing shallowly over a mirror. It stretched away far to the left, confined deep between its dim, bare heights, like a luminous ribbon. Downstream were several fairy-like islands half-revealed through the mist with their unreal foliage.
It was a kind of gigantic trough that confined the river. From the edge of the bank the land stretched back in gentle undulations. Behind them and off to the left as far as they could see rolled an unbroken sea of grass showing a strange, dark green in the half-light. To the right about half a mile away the wooded hills began, rising tier behind tier. The river first appeared foaming from behind a spur of these hills. Behind him in the grass Ralph was astonished to discover two ancient log shacks with boarded windows and padlocked doors. They reminded him with a faint shock of the existence of fellow white men.
Nahnya was busy wrapping a pack within blankets. After cording the bundle and tying it, she gave it to Charley, and with a laconic command, led the way down the precipitous slope. They scrambled and slid down to the water's edge, accompanied by miniature avalanches of gravel. At the bottom, drawn up on the stones, there was a little raft made of four lengths of dead timber lashed together with a strong light cord. A little paddle was stuck between the logs. The cord was the same that had been used to bind him; a length of it was now around the pack that Charley carried. Ralph recognized Nahnya's handiwork. This was what she had been doing with the axe during the previous afternoon while he and Charley slept.