there flung it overboard. We had
scarcely left it fifty fathoms astern when there arose a sudden violent
commotion in the water about it, and a second or two later it
disappeared from view, dragged down by the voracious crocodiles with
which the river swarmed.

I was by this time quite free from pain, and apart from a feeling of
extreme debility, which I had endured for some hours on the previous
day, I was not much the worse for the alarming experience that I had
undergone. The death of the savage who had been bitten after me, and
undoubtedly by the same reptile, conclusively proved how very narrow had
been my escape from a similar fate; and I naturally fell to wondering
how it was that he had succumbed to his injury while I had recovered
from mine. For it seemed to me at the moment that the remedial measure
which he had adopted ought, from its very severe and drastic character,
to have proved much more efficacious than my own; whereas the opposite
was the case. But upon further reflection I came to the conclusion that
while I had proceeded to suck the poison from the wound _at once_, or
within a second or two of its infliction, the savage had wasted at least
a minute in pursuing and slaying his enemy before cauterising his wound,
and that this minute of delay, accompanied as it was by somewhat violent
action on the part of the injured man, had sufficed for the poison to
obtain a strong enough hold upon his system to produce fatal results.
Whether or not this is the correct explanation I must leave to those who
are better qualified than myself to judge.

Day after day we steadily pursued our course up the river, which, for
the most part, retained the same dreary, monotonous aspect of low, bush-
clad, mangrove-lined banks, and practically the same width, save where,
at occasional intervals, it widened out and became dotted with islands,
some of considerable size. At length we arrived at a point where the
land on the western bank rose into a range of hills some eight or nine
hundred feet high, densely clothed with vegetation to their summits.
This range of hills extended northward for a distance of about thirty
miles before it once more sank into the plain; but before it sank
completely out of sight astern more high land was sighted ahead, and two
days later we found ourselves navigating among some very picturesque
scenery, with high land on both sides of us, some of the peaks being
twelve to fourteen hundred feet