To be sure, I had but to enquire of the storekeeper to learn all I wanted; but I was averse from betraying my interest to him or to any one in the settlement—for, after all, it was my own affair, and hers. So I determined to pursue my policy of watching and waiting, letting a day or two elapse before I again went out wandering with my gun.
Probably she would be making another trip to the settlement, before long. Doubtless, it was for that purpose that she was visiting her very original safety-deposit vault when I had come so embarrassingly upon her.
However, inaction, in the circumstances, was difficult, and when two days had gone without bringing any sign of her, I determined to follow the trail of my last expedition, and find out whether that strip of rocky coast, with its hidden cavern, actually did stand firm somewhere on the solid earth, or was merely a phantom coast fronting
"The foam of perilous seas in faery-land forlorn."
As a matter of fact, I did find it, after having lost my way in the thick brush several times before doing so. I reckoned, when at last I emerged upon it, that it was a distance of some six or seven miles from the settlement, though, owing to my ignorance of the way, it had taken me a whole morning to cover it. Did she have to thread these thorny thickets every time she came to the little town? No; doubtless she was acquainted with some easier and shorter path.
However, here was the cliff-bastioned sea-front, and down there was the boulder on which she had stood like a statue in the moonlight. I craned my neck over the edge of the cliffs to catch sight of the entrance to her cave—but in vain. Nor was there apparent any way of reaching it from above. Evidently it was only approachable from the sea.
Then I looked about for some signs of a house; but, though it was full noon-day, the forest presented an unbroken front of close-growing trees, and a rich confusion of various foliage uncommon on those islands. I counted at least a dozen varieties, among which were horseflesh, wild tamarind, redwood, pigeon-plum, poison wood, gum-elemi, fig, logwood, and mahogany.
Evidently there was an unusually thick layer of soil over the coral rock in this part of the island, which was in the main composed of the usual clinker and scrub—where it was not mangrove swamp. Yet in spite of appearances, it was certain that there must be some sort of dwelling there-about, and not so very far off either—unless, indeed, my mysterious girl was but a mermaid after all.
So I left the craggy bluff facing the sea, and plunged into the woods. I had no idea how dark it was going to be, but, coming out of the sun, I was at once bewildered by the deep and complicated gloom of massed branches overhead, and the denser darkness of shrubs and vines so intricately interwoven, as almost to make a solid wall about one. Then the atmosphere was so close and airless that a fear of suffocation combined at once with the other fear of being swallowed up in all this savage green life, without hope of finding one's way out again into the sun. I had fought my way in but a very few yards when both these fears clutched hold of me with a sudden horror, and the perspiration poured from me; I could no longer distinguish between the way I had come and any other part of the wood! Indeed, there was no way anywhere!
It was now only a question of sturdy fighting and squirming one's way through the meshes of a gigantic basketwork of every variety of fantastic branch and stem and stout strangling thorn-set vine, made the denser with snaky roots—not merely twisting about one's feet, but dropping from the boughs in nooses and festoons for one's neck; air-plants too, like birds' nests, further choking up the meshes, and hanging moss, like rotting carpets, adding still more to the murk and curious squalor of a foul fertility where beauty, like humanity, found it impossible to breathe.