We bathed ourselves in a limpid pool to freshen and brace our nerves; I armed me with a cudgel formed of a young tree torn up by the roots; Hartly had still his war-club; and resolving to travel only under cloud of night, as cautiously as possible, and to avoid all negro camps and villages, we found the highway—if it could be called so—which leads from the city of Benin towards the Waree.
CHAPTER LVI.
A PERILOUS JOURNEY.
In our ignorance of the wild country through which we travelled, our sole guide towards the sea was the course of the river Formosa, which rapidly widened into a mighty estuary, along the left bank of which we proceeded with the utmost circumspection; and inspired by the triple dread of being recaptured and killed by the natives, devoured by wild animals, or sinking under the heavy miasma which exhales from the marshy creeks and isles of the uncounted river-mouths which there pour their muddy tides into the Bight of Benin, laden with the decaying vegetable débris of an unexplored world.
By various sounds which the wind swept after us at times, such as the baying of dogs, and notes of cane horns, we feared a pursuit by the people of Benin, and the sequel proved that our fears were but too true.
We were frequently bewildered by seeing large lakes, which we conceived to be the sea, till dawn of day would reveal their size, and the gigantic trees or walls of wavy reeds which surrounded their stagnant waters.
Hartly often beguiled the way by relating strange stories he had heard or read, and by the margin of one of those silent lakes in the wilderness he told me of the shattered hull of an ancient ship being found, beached upon the bank of one of those inland waters in the continent of Africa.
"How came it to be cast up there?" I asked, with surprise.
"Some alleged that it came through a subterraneous opening, a channel in the bowels of the earth, connected with the same vortex or whirlpool which had sucked it down long years ago—the Maelstrom, perhaps, though many say that, like Charybdis, no such place exists. But it sounds very like a bouncing yarn, such as one may hear at the Royal Society, or under the leech of the foresail of a fine night, Jack, when the middle watch are spinning their twisters."
We spent a whole night wearily and anxiously circumnavigating the banks of one of those lakes whose waters were full of thick green slime, of sturdy reeds, and leaves of wondrous size and form; falling into black quagmires and deep holes made by the clumsy hippopotami, and every instant in danger of being pounced upon by a panther or a poisonous snake for our intrusion upon their secluded domains.