h and terror stalk hand in hand. But life trails them. Where
one falls, countless others spring up to fill the gap. The rivers
and _pantanos_ yield their quota of variegated forms. The flat
_perania_, the dreaded electric eel, infests the warm streams, and
inflicts its torture without discrimination upon all who dare invade
its domain. Snakes lurk in the fetid swamps and lagoons, the
brilliant coral and the deadly _mapina_. Beneath the forest leaves
coils the brown adder, whose sting proves fatal within three days.

To those who see only these aspects of the jungle, a journey such as
that undertaken by Rosendo and his intrepid little band would prove a
terrifying experience, a constant repetition of nerve-shocks, under
which the "centers" must ultimately give way. But to the two
Americans, fresh from the mining camps of the West, and attuned to any
pitch that Nature might strike in her marvelous symphony, the
experience was one to be taken in the same spirit as all else that
pertained to their romantic calling. Rosendo and his men accepted the
day's stint of toil and danger with dull stolidity. Carmen threw
herself upon her thought, and saw in her shifting environment only the
human mind's interpretation of its mixed concept of good and evil. The
insects swarmed around her as around the others. The tantalizing
_jejenes_ urged their insidious attacks upon her, as upon the rest.
Her hands were dotted with tiny blood-blisters where the ravenous
gnats had fed. But she uttered no complaint; nor would she discuss the
matter when Harris proffered his sympathy, and showed his own red
hands.

"It isn't true," she would say. "But you have no religion, and you
don't understand--as yet."

"Don't understand? And it isn't true, eh? Well, you have mighty
strange beliefs, young lady!"

"But not as strange and illogical as those you hold," she replied.

"Oh, I don't believe anything," he answered, with a shrug of his
shoulders. "I'm an agnostic, you know."

"There is just where you mistake, Mr. Harris," she returned gravely.
"For, instead of not believing anything, you firmly believe in the
presence and power of evil. It is just those very people who boast
that they do not believe in anything who believe most thoroughly in
evil and its omnipotence and omnipresence."

Yes, even the animals which she saw about her were but the human
mind's concepts of God's ideas--not real. Adam had named them. In the
Bible allegory, or dream, th