Thereupon he laughed again and again, but not very heartily; and then, perceiving that the path began to widen and grow higher, “There!” said he. “What did I tell you? We are past the worst.”
Indeed, we had now come to the bayou, which was in that place very narrow and bridged across by a fallen trunk; but on either hand we could see it broaden out, under a cavern of great arms of trees and hanging creepers: sluggish, putrid, of a horrible and sickly stench, floated on by the flat heads of alligators, and its banks alive with scarlet crabs.
“If we fall from that unsteady bridge,” said I, “see, where the caiman lies ready to devour us! If, by the least divergence from the path, we should be snared in a morass, see, where those myriads of scarlet vermin scour the border of the thicket! Once helpless, how they would swarm together to the assault! What could man do against a thousand of such mailed assailants? And what a death were that, to perish alive under their claws!”
“Are you mad, girl?” he cried. “I bid you be silent and lead on.”
Again I looked upon him, half relenting; and at that he raised the stick that was in his hand and cruelly struck me on the face. “Lead on!” he cried again. “Must I be all day, catching my death in this vile slough, and all for a prating slave-girl?”
I took the blow in silence, I took it smiling; but the blood welled back upon my heart. Something, I know not what, fell at that moment with a dull plunge in the waters of the lagoon, and I told myself it was my pity that had fallen.
On the farther side, to which we now hastily scrambled, the wood was not so dense, the web of creepers not so solidly convolved. It was possible, here and there, to mark a patch of somewhat brighter daylight, or to distinguish, through the lighter web of parasites, the proportions of some soaring tree. The cypress on the left stood very visibly forth, upon the edge of such a clearing; the path in that place widened broadly; and there was a patch of open ground, beset with horrible ant-heaps, thick with their artificers. I laid down the tools and basket by the cypress root, where they were instantly blackened over with the crawling ants; and looked once more in the face of my unconscious victim. Mosquitoes and foul flies wove so close a veil between us that his features were obscured; and the sound of their flight was like the turning of a mighty wheel.
“Here,” I said, “is the spot. I cannot dig, for I have not learned to use such instruments; but, for your own sake, I beseech you to be swift in what you do.”
He had sunk once more upon the ground, panting like a fish; and I saw rising in his face the same dusky flush that had mantled on my father’s. “I feel ill,” he gasped, “horribly ill; the swamp turns around me; the drone of these carrion flies confounds me. Have you not wine?”