The need they both had for sleep and food decided them, and, after weighing all the chances for and against their project, they fell on their faces and crawled into the wood. Fortune favored them, and enabled them to come upon a banana-tree loaded with the luscious fruit, which they plucked and carried with them into a shaded natural bower.
After they had eaten all they desired, they laid themselves down and fell into a refreshing sleep, which even their fear of cannibals could not disturb. When they awoke, the stars were shining.
They first ate some of the bananas, and then discussed the route they should take. It did not take them long to decide that the safest plan, as well as the most direct road, would be to keep along the beach as much as was possible, climbing or skirting any cliffs that might interpose themselves.
With this plan in view, they made their way back around the cliff, but reached the other side of it only to discover that it was as crowded now as it had been deserted during the day, the natives being scattered along it for a long distance—some of them gathered around fires, at which something was evidently cooking, and which they at once, with a horrible fear, fancied the worst of.
They hastened back as they had come, and decided without loss of time to strike into the woods and go back a mile or more, and then take an easterly course, which would bring them into a nearly parallel line with the beach.
“I remember, now,” said Diego, “that the villages of these Indians are always near enough to the beach to enable them to get to it.”
“Yes,” said Juan. “It is either so, or far back in the interior.”
But in this they were wrong, and, so far as it concerned the island of Bohio, or Haiti, as it really was called, they discovered their mistake ere very long. They retraced their steps in the wood until they came to where they had slept, and made a fresh departure from there. They had not gone two miles, however, before they almost stumbled into a small village.
Greatly dismayed, they made a careful detour and passed the village; but they were so fearful of coming upon other villages that they proceeded now much more cautiously. Even that did not help them greatly, however, for after another two miles, perhaps, they came upon a very large village, and in endeavoring to go around this they became hopelessly lost.
If they could have seen the heavens, they could have gained their bearings by the stars; but the woods were too dense for that, and they would have been obliged to stop and wait for daylight if Juan had not pointed out that they were certainly going up hill, which would indicate that they were going south, since the hills, as they had noticed from the canoe, ran east and west.