his man?" demanded the magistrate, in reference to a
dissipated-looking prisoner.

"Un Inglez bebado" (a drunken Englishman), replied the constable.

"A drunken Englishman," followed the magistrate, "What a pleonasm!"

A little later Burton and his wife went down a mine which ran three
quarters of a mile into the earth. "The negret Chico," says Burton,
"gave one glance at the deep, dark pit, wrung his hands and fled the
Tophet, crying that nothing in the wide, wide world would make him enter
such an Inferno. He had lately been taught that he is a responsible
being, with an 'immortal soul,' and he was beginning to believe it in a
rough, theoretical way: this certainly did not look like a place 'where
the good niggers go.'" However, if Chico turned coward Burton and his
wife did not hesitate. But they had moments of fearful suspense as they
sank slowly down into the black abysm. The snap of a single link in the
long chain would have meant instantaneous death; and a link had snapped
but a few days previous, with fatal results. Arrived at the bottom they
found themselves in a vast cave lighted with a few lamps--the walls
black as night or reflecting slender rays from the polished watery
surface. Distinctly Dantesque was the gulf between the huge mountain
sides which threatened every moment to fall. One heard the click and
thud of hammers, the wild chants of the borers, the slush of water.
Being like gnomes and kobolds glided hither and thither--half naked
figures muffled up by the mist. Here dark bodies, gleaming with beaded
heat drops, hung in what seemed frightful positions; "they swung
like Leotard from place to place." Others swarmed up loose ropes like
Troglodytes. It was a situation in which "thoughts were many and where
words were few."

Burton and his wife were not sorry when they found themselves above
ground again and in the sweet light of day.

54. Down the Sao Francisco.

The next event was a canoe journey which Burton made alone down the
river Sao Francisco from its source to the falls of Paulo Affonso--and
then on to the sea, a distance of 1500 miles--an astounding feat even
for him. During these adventures a stanza in his own unpublished version
of Camoens constantly cheered him:

"Amid such scenes with danger fraught and pain
Serving the fiery spirit more to flame,
Who woos bright honour, he shall ever win
A true nobility, a deathless fame:
Not they who love to lean, u