“Is there not a path from here to the mountains?” I asked.
“Oh, yes;” she said; “there must be many paths.”
“Do you know them?”
“Not to go to them from here. Often I and my women cross to the great forest from our village; but we seldom come here at all.”
“I don’t blame you,” growled Moit. “This part of your country isn’t worth photographing. What shall we do now, Sam?”
“I don’t like to go back,” said I, studying the map with a suspicion that its maker had never been in this section at all. “But we might try these hills. If we could find a path over them it might lead us around the marsh, and then we would be all right.”
“How do you know? There may be more marshes,” he suggested.
“It may be. This is all guess work, it seems—map and all. But if we reached the ocean we could run along the beach at low tide, and make good time.”
“It is certainly worth a trial,” he said; “and if we fail we cannot be any worse off than we are at present.”
I doubted that the automobile would be much of a hill-climber, because until then I had a notion that the heaviest machines, with the most power to move their weight, could climb the easiest. But a few minutes removed that erratic idea from my mind. We skimmed up the slopes as lightly as an ibex, and went down them much more safely than a heavy machine under the strain of brakes could do. And so, winding around this hill and over that, we kept on at an easy pace until the breath of salt air could be felt and we knew we were close to the sea.