over, comparatively speaking; so, if you don't
mind, we'll get to work at once and shift quarters before nightfall."

No sooner said than done. As I had surmised, a party of twenty
unwounded men, under the boatswain, had been left behind by the skipper
to look after the camp when he had gone away early in the morning, and
these men were now called in to convey the most seriously wounded down
to the launch, while the less seriously hurt helped each other; and in
this way the whole of the occupants of the camp were got down to the
launch and placed on board her in about twenty minutes. Then Hutchinson
caused his medicine-chest to be taken down to the boat, together with
such other matters as he thought might be useful; and, lastly, poor
Nugent's body was taken down and reverently covered over with the ship's
ensign, which had been saved, laid on a rough, impromptu platform on the
thwarts amidships--the other poor fellows who had fallen in the fight
had been buried before the setting-out of the boat expedition, I now
learned. A final look round the camp was then taken by Purchase and
Hutchinson; a few more articles that were thought worth preserving from
possible midnight raiders were brought down; and then we got under way
and stood up the river, keeping in the slack water as much as possible,
in order to cheat the current.

It was within an hour of sunset when Purchase, who had been standing up
in the stern-sheets of the boat, intently studying the shore of the
right bank of the river for some ten minutes, gave the order to douse
the canvas and stand by to ship the oars; and as he did so he waved his
hand to the coxswain, who put down his helm and sheered the boat in
toward what looked like an unbroken belt of mangroves stretching for
miles along the bank. But as the launch, with plenty of way on her,
surged forward, an opening gradually revealed itself; and presently we
slid into a creek, or channel, some two hundred feet wide, the margins
of which were heavily fringed with mangroves, and at once found
ourselves winding along this narrow passage of oil-smooth, turbid water,
in a stagnant atmosphere of roasting heat that was redolent of all the
odours of foetid mud and decaying vegetation. This channel proved to be
about a mile long, and curved round gradually from a north-easterly to a
south-easterly direction, ending in a fine spacious lagoon about eight
miles long by from three to four miles wide at its widest po