“Huh,” said Cammock, snorting. “I think I see you floundering towards that little city. Man alive. Good heart alive. D’ye know what sort one of them rivers is, to go up? You’ve neither skill nor sense of it. You lie there bilged in your bunk like a barge at low tide, and you come the funny nigger, trying to get a raise. I’ll tell you what them rivers is like. See here, now. Listen to me. I’ll perhaps give you some idea of the land you’re bound for.”
“Really? I don’t know that I want to hear you.”
“No. But I want you to hear me, Mr. Stukeley. I’ll tell you where the golden city is.”
“Now you’re talking business.”
“I’m glad to hear it. Well. When you come in from the Samballoes, you’ll see the land ahead of you, like a wall of green. Just like a wall. Think. Dense. Then you come to two rivers, about thirty yards across. They’re the two mouths of the Conception River. You try to go up one of them in your boat. First thing you know is a thundering big bar. You’d be surprised how ugly them little bars get. Well. Suppose you get across. What’s next? D’ye know what a snag is?”
“A branch of alder or willow, fallen into the river.”
“Yes. Or a whole whacking big great oak, Mr. Stukeley, fallen right across, and rotting there. With its branches all jammed up with drift and drowned things. Hornets’ nests stuck in ’em. Great grey paper bags. So then you land, and take out your macheat, and cut a path around that tree, and drag your boat round. May take you an hour or more. Then into your boat again, after sliding down a mud-bank with eighteen inch of slime on top. Presently you come to a lot more trees. Out you get and cut another road. Perhaps you go back a half-mile to find a place where you can land. Oh. It’s death, going up one of them brooks. Then, there’s shallows where you wade. Rapids where you wade and haul, losing your footing and getting soused. By and by comes a cloud-burst somewhere in the hills above. Or perhaps a jam of logs bursts, a kind of a natural dam, a mile or two above you. Then. Woosh. You see a wall of water a yard high coming at you. If you’re slippy on your oars you get ashore from that. Maybe you hear it coming. It makes a roar like the tide. You drag your boat ashore.”
“Aren’t you rather laying it on for my benefit?”
“As for laying it on, Mr. Stukeley, I’ll make you judge for yourself as soon as we come on the coast. I tell you one thing. You’ll sing mighty small when you come to tackle such a country. That’s something you won’t have learned, where you learned your manners.”
Stukeley laughed. “Well. Go on with your yarn,” he said. “I like hearing of foreign parts.”