t smoking and thinking and listening to the rain.

Toward night a thunderstorm livened things up a little, and a howling wind
came over the forest on the heels of the storm.

Adams came out on the veranda to listen.

He could have sworn that a great sea was roaring below in the darkness. He
could hear the waves, the boom and burst of them, the suck-back of the
billows tearing the shrieking shale to their hearts, the profound and
sonorous roar of leagues of coast. Imagination could do anything with that
sound except figure the reality of it or paint the tremendous forest
bending to the wind in billows of foliage a hundred leagues long; the roar
of the cotton-woods, the cry of the palm, the sigh of the withered
euphorbias, the thunderous drumming of the great plantain leaves, all
joining in one tremendous symphony led by the trumpets of the wind, broken
by rainbursts from the rushing clouds overhead, and all in viewless
darkness, black as the darkness of the pit.

This was a new phase of the forest, which since the day Adams entered it
first, had steadily been explaining to him the endlessness of its mystery,
its wonder, and its terror.

CHAPTER XXXII

MOONLIGHT ON THE POOLS

Now began for Adams a time of trial, enough to break the nerve of any
ordinary man. Day followed day and week followed week, Berselius gaining
strength so slowly that his companion began to despair at last, fancying
that the main fountain and source of life had been injured, and that the
stream would never flow again but in a trickle, to be stopped at the least
shock or obstruction.

The man was too weak to talk, he could just say "Yes" and "No" in answer
to a question, and it was always "Better" when he was asked how he felt,
but he never spoke a word of his own volition.

Nearly every day it rained, and it rained in a hundred different
ways--from the thunderous shower-bath rush of water that threatened to
beat the roof in, to the light spitting shower shone through by the sun.
Sometimes the clouds would divide, roll up in snow-white billows of
appalling height, and over the fuming foliage a rainbow would form, and
flocks of birds, as if released by some wizard, break from the reeking
trees. Adams could hear their cries as he stood at the foot wall watching
them circle in the air, and his heart went out to them, for they were the
only living things in the world around him that spoke in a kindly tongue
or hinted at the tenderness of