ore than
a couple of yards below my feet, seemed to offer a means of escape.
Nerving myself with the thought that if I got crushed by the fall I
should probably escape a lingering and far more painful death, I dropped
into the cloud of foliage beneath me and clutched desperately at the
twigs as I fell. For a moment I felt myself sustained; but branch after
branch gave way beneath my weight, and then I only remember, very dimly,
a swift flight through the air before losing consciousness.

CHAPTER VII

With the return of consciousness, I at first had a vague impression that
I was lying somewhere, injured, and incapable of motion; that it was
night, and necessary for me to keep my eyes fast shut to prevent them
from being blinded by almost continuous vivid flashes of lightning.
Injured, and sore all over, but warm and dry--surely dry; nor was it
lightning that dazzled, but firelight. I began to notice things little
by little. The fire was burning on a clay floor a few feet from where I
was lying. Before it, on a log of wood, sat or crouched a human figure.
An old man, with chin on breast and hands clasped before his drawn-up
knees; only a small portion of his forehead and nose visible to me. An
Indian I took him to be, from his coarse, lank, grey hair and dark brown
skin. I was in a large hut, falling at the sides to within two feet of
the floor; but there were no hammocks in it, nor bows and spears, and
no skins, not even under me, for I was lying on straw mats. I could hear
the storm still raging outside; the rush and splash of rain, and, at
intervals, the distant growl of thunder. There was wind, too; I listened
to it sobbing in the trees, and occasionally a puff found its way in,
and blew up the white ashes at the old man's feet, and shook the yellow
flames like a flag. I remembered now how the storm began, the wild girl,
the snake-bite, my violent efforts to find a way out of the woods, and,
finally, that leap from the bank where recollection ended. That I had
not been killed by the venomous tooth, nor the subsequent fearful fall,
seemed like a miracle to me. And in that wild, solitary place, lying
insensible, in that awful storm and darkness, I had been found by a
fellow creature--a savage, doubtless, but a good Samaritan all the
same--who had rescued me from death! I was bruised all over and did not
attempt to move, fearing the pain it would give me; and I had a racking
headache; but these seemed trifling disco