Miss Leslie took the suggestion, knotting the big square of linen over her fluffy brown hair.
Blake waited only for her to draw out the kerchief, before he began to force a way through the jungle. Now and then he beat at the tangled vegetation with his club. Though he held to the line by which he had left the thicket, yet all his efforts failed to open an easy passage for the others. Many of the thorny branches sprang back into place behind him, and as Miss Leslie, who was the first to follow, sought to thrust them aside, the thorns pierced her delicate skin, until her hands were covered with blood. Nor did Winthrope, stumbling and hobbling behind her, fare any better. Twice he tripped headlong into the brush, scratching his arms and face.
Blake took his own punishment as a matter of course, though his tougher and thicker skin made his injuries less painful. He advanced steadily along the line of bent and broken twigs that marked his outward passage, until the thicket opened on a strip of grassy ground beneath a wild fig-tree.
“By Jove!” exclaimed Winthrope, “a banyan!”
“Banyan? Well, if that’s British for a daisy, you’ve hit it,” responded Blake. “Just take a squint up here. How’s that for a roost?”
Winthrope and Miss Leslie stared up dubiously at the edge of a bed of reeds gathered in the hollow of one of the huge flattened branches at its junction with the main trunk of the banyan, twenty feet above them.
“Will not the mosquitoes pester us, here among the trees?” objected Winthrope.
“Storm must have blown ’em away. I haven’t seen any yet.”
“There will be millions after sunset.”
“Maybe; but I bet they keep below our roost”