u,
from nowhere, going nowhere, I hardly knew whether to call him young or
old. But I made my guess. That terrible winter had branded him. When I
asked him his name, he said:

"I am a wanderer, and in wandering I have lost my name. Call me M'sieu."

I found this was a long speech for him, that his tongue was tied by a
horrible silence. When I told him where I was going, and described the
country I was going through, and that I wanted a man, he merely nodded
that he would accompany me.

We started in a canoe, and I placed him ahead of me so that I could
make out, if I could, something of what he was. His hair was dark. His
beard was dark. His eyes were sunken but strangely clear. They puzzled
me. They were always questing. Always seeking. And always expecting, it
seemed to me. A man of unfathomable mystery, of unutterable tragedy, of
a silence that was almost inhuman. Was he mad? I ask you,
gentlemen--was he mad? And I leave the answer to you. To me he was
good. When I told him what mon pere had been to me, and that I wanted
to reach him before he died, he spoke no word of hope or sympathy--but
worked until his muscles cracked. We ate together, we drank together,
we slept side by side--and it was like eating and drinking and sleeping
with a sphinx which some strange miracle had endowed with life.

The second day we entered the Sulphur Country. The stink of it was in
our nostrils that second night we camped. The moon rose, and we saw it
as if through the fumes of a yellow smoke. Far behind us we heard a
wolf howl, and it was the last sound of life. With the dawn we went on.
We passed through broad, low morasses out of which rose the sulphurous
fogs. In many places the water we touched with our hands was hot; in
other places the forests we paddled through were so dense they were
almost tropical. And lifeless. Still, with the stillness of death for
thousands and perhaps tens of thousands of years. The food we ate
seemed saturated with the vileness of sulphur; it seeped into our
water-bags; it turned us to the color of saffron; it was terrible,
frightening, inconceivable. And still we went on by compass, and M'sieu
showed no fear--even less, gentlemen, than did I.

And then, on the third day--in the heart of this diseased and horrible
region--we made a discovery that drew a strange cry even from those
mysteriously silent lips of M'sieu.

It was the print of a naked human foot in a bar of mud.

How it came there, why