with help from the natives, otherwise I do not
see how I could have continued my journey; yet in my dim mental picture
of that period I see myself incessantly dogged by hostile savages. They
flit like ghosts through the dark forest; they surround me and cut off
all retreat, until I burst through them, escaping out of their very
hands, to fly over some wide, naked savannah, hearing their shrill,
pursuing yells behind me, and feeling the sting of their poisoned arrows
in my flesh.

This I set down to the workings of remorse in a disordered mind and to
clouds of venomous insects perpetually shrilling in my ears and stabbing
me with their small, fiery needles.

Not only was I pursued by phantom savages and pierced by phantom arrows,
but the creations of the Indian imagination had now become as real to
me as anything in nature. I was persecuted by that superhuman man-eating
monster supposed to be the guardian of the forest. In dark, silent
places he is lying in wait for me: hearing my slow, uncertain footsteps
he starts up suddenly in my path, outyelling the bearded aguaratos in
the trees; and I stand paralysed, my blood curdled in my veins. His
huge, hairy arms are round me; his foul, hot breath is on my skin; he
will tear my liver out with his great green teeth to satisfy his raging
hunger. Ah, no, he cannot harm me! For every ravening beast, every
cold-blooded, venomous thing, and even the frightful Curupita, half
brute and half devil, that shared the forest with her, loved and
worshipped Rima, and that mournful burden I carried, her ashes, was a
talisman to save me. He has left me, the semi-human monster, uttering
such wild, lamentable cries as he hurries away into the deeper, darker
woods that horror changes to grief, and I, too, lament Rima for
the first time: a memory of all the mystic, unimaginable grace and
loveliness and joy that had vanished smites on my heart with such
sudden, intense pain that I cast myself prone on the earth and weep
tears that are like drops of blood.

Where in the rude savage heart of Guiana was this region where the
natural obstacles and pain and hunger and thirst and everlasting
weariness were terrible enough without the imaginary monsters and
legions of phantoms that peopled it, I cannot say. Nor can I conjecture
how far I strayed north or south from my course. I only know that
marshes that were like Sloughs of Despond, and barren and wet savannahs,
were crossed; and forests that seemed