ht enter at
once into a peaceful night of tranquil and unbroken slumber, while I,
a tenderfoot then, must needs beat my stakes down into the ground with
tremendous energy, only to come to earth with a resounding thwack the
moment I mounted my couch.

The Red Man made his comment, smiling: "Yellow earth, much squeeze."
Which, being translated, informed me that the clayey ground I had
chosen, hard though it seemed, was more like putty in that it would
slip and slip with the prolonged pressure until the post fell inward
and catastrophe crowned my endeavor.

So it follows that the hammock, in company with an adequate tarpaulin
and two trustworthy stakes, will survive the heaviest downpour as well
as the most arid and uncompromising desert. But since it is man-made,
with finite limitations, nature is not without means to defeat its
purpose. The hammock cannot cope with the cold--real cold, that is,
not the sudden chill of tropical night which a blanket resists, but
the cold of the north or of high altitudes. This is the realm of the
sleeping-bag, the joy of which is another story. More than once I have
had to use a hammock at high levels, since there was nothing else at
hand; and the numbness of the Arctic was mine. Every mesh seemed to
invite a separate draught. The winds of heaven--all four--played
unceasingly upon me, and I became in due time a swaying mummy of ice.
It was my delusion that I was a dead Indian cached aloft upon my
arboreal bier--which is not a normal state of mind for the sleeping
explorer.

Anything rather than this helpless surrender to the elements. Better
the lowlands and that fantastic shroud, the mosquitaro. For even to
wind one's self into this is an experience of note. It is ingenious,
and called the mosquito shirt because of its general shape, which is
as much like a shirt as anything else. A large round center covers the
hammock, and two sleeves extend up the supporting strands and inclose
the ends, being tied to the ring-ropes. If at sundown swarms of
mosquitoes become unbearable, one retires into his netting funnel, and
there disrobes. Clothes are rolled into a bundle and tied to the
hammock, that one may close one's eyes reasonably confident that the
supply will not be diminished by some small marauder. It is then that
a miracle is enacted. For one is at last enabled, under these
propitious circumstances, to achieve the impossible, to control and
manipulate the void and the invisible, to o