“And how long?”
“That depends—perhaps twenty.”
“Then, in Heaven’s name, lead on. It is life or death? Even five minutes may make all the difference. Which way?”
“By this trail to the right, and through the forest.”
The trail is a broad grass-grown path, not unlike a “ride” in an English wood, bordered by trees and thick undergrowth, but fairly lighted by the moonbeams, and, fortunately for us, rather downhill, with no obstacles more formidable than fallen branches, and here and there a prostrate monarch of the forest, which we easily surmount.
As we go on I notice that the character of the vegetation begins to change. The trees are less leafy, the undergrowth is less dense, and a mephitic odor pervades the air. Presently the foliage disappears altogether, and the trees and bushes are as bare as if they had been stricken with the blast of an Arctic winter; but instead of being whitened with snow or silvered with frost they are covered with an incrustation, which in the brilliant moonlight makes them look like trees and bushes of gold. Over their tops rise faint wreaths of yellowish clouds and the mephitic odor becomes more pronounced.
“At last!” shouts Carmen, as we reach the end of the trail. “At last! Amigo mio, we are saved!”
Before us stretches a wide treeless waste like a turf moor, with a background of sombre forest. The moor, which is broken into humps and hillocks, smokes and boils and babbles like the hell-broth of Macbeth’s witches, and across it winds, snake-wise, a steaming brook. Here and there is a stagnant pool, and underneath can be heard a dull roar, as if an imprisoned ocean were beating on a pebble-strewed shore. There is an unmistakable smell of sulphur, and the ground on which we stand, as well as the moor itself, is of a deep-yellow cast.
This, then, is the azuferales—a region of sulphur springs, a brimstone inferno, a volcano in the making. No hounds will follow us over that hideous heath and through that Stygian stream.
“Can we get across and live?” I ask. “Will it bear?”