o little courage to go alone at
all, with such hair-raising beliefs as he had. We each took food and a
flask of rum and water to last us the day, and we promised to halloo now
and again to each other for company, as soon as we got out of sight of
each other. This, however, did not happen the first day. Of course, we
carried a machete and a mattock apiece, though the latter was but little
use, and, if either of us should find any spot worth dynamiting, we
agreed to let the other know.

Harder work than we had undertaken no men have ever set their hands to.
It would have broken the back of the most able-bodied navvy; and when we
reached the boat at sunset, we had scarce strength left to eat our
supper and roll into our bunks. A machete is a heavy weapon that needs
no little skill in handling with economy of force, and Tom, who had been
brought up to it, was, in spite of his years, a better practitioner than
I.

I have already hinted at the kind of devil's underbrush we had to cut
our way through, but no words can do justice to the almost intelligent
stubbornness with which those weird growths opposed us. It really seemed
as though they were inspired by a diabolic will-force pitting itself
against our wills, vegetable incarnations of evil strength and fury and
cunning.

Battalions of actual serpents could scarcely have been harder to fight
than these writhing, tormented shapes that shrieked and hissed and bled
strangely under our strokes, and seemed to swarm with new life at each
onset! And the rock was almost more terrible to grapple with than they.
Jagged and pointed, it was like needles and razors to walk on; and it
was brittle as it was hard. While it could sometimes resist a hammer, it
would at others smash under our feet like a tea-cup. It looked like some
metallic dross long since vomited up from the furnaces of hell.

Only once in a while was a softer, limestone, formation--like the pit
in which we had buried the captain--with hints at honeycombing, and
possibilities that invariably came to nothing. Now again we would come
upon a rock of this kind that seemed for a second to hint at mysterious
markings made by the hand of man, but they proved to be nothing but some
decorative sea-fossilisation, making an accidental pattern, like the
marking you sometimes come across on some old weathered stone on a moor.
Nothing that the fondest fancy could twist into the likeness of a
compass or a cross!

Day after day, Tom