“But oh! the terrible surprise!
“The water was salt and brackish, not fresh. It was a lagoon, or arm of the sea, running up between a gorge of the hills, and not a river after all.”
Volume Two--Chapter Six.
The Crocodile’s Victim.
“You won’t think I’m exaggerating, sir, or that we were unmanly; but I assure you that one and all of us broke down under this disappointment, and cried as if we were a parcel of children. It was like the last straw, you know, that broke the camel’s back!
“As soon as we all recovered a bit from the disappointment, I told the men that we must make the best or worst of it, and that it would probably ease their thirst if they bathed in the lagoon. This some of them did, but the majority gave way to despair; and if we had not lugged one chap out he would have drowned himself.
“We had a long rest here, if rest you can call it when fellows felt utterly burnt up with the heat, and so parched with thirst and famished with hunger that their whole inside was all one gnawing crave for food and drink; but it eased us a bit, and Magellan and I held a council of war, as you might say, looking matters in the face and studying our position.
“As near as I could judge from what I had observed when cruising off the coast, we should have to cross three more mountains similar to the one we had just got over, and travel through three more valleys like this in the same way, before arriving within hail of Majunga; for I knew there were three bays between Cape Tangan and the port we were aiming for—Pasanda, Radama, and another whose name I forget. The question was, would we ever get over the distance? If we did not meet with water soon, it would be utterly impossible for us to accomplish the journey; and, as the dry season had now set in, our chance of finding stray rivulets and mountain streams would grow each day less and less—unless, sir, you’ve ever been in the tropics you can’t tell how quickly the appearance of the country alters with the change of the season! A place, one day, may be all foaming down with cataracts and mountain torrents, with a river perhaps lying in your way that you would have to swim through to get over to the other side of it; while, the next time you visit the same locality, even within a week, the mountain torrents and cataracts will have vanished as if by magic, and the river you had to swim over or found impassable will now have dwindled down to a tiny streamlet that a child could paddle in, or else have completely dried up, leaving only a rocky channel in the ground with huge boulders tossed about here and there to show where it had been.