craggy bluff facing the sea, and plunged into the woods. I
had no idea how dark it was going to be, but, coming out of the sun, I
was at once bewildered by the deep and complicated gloom of massed
branches overhead, and the denser darkness of shrubs and vines so
intricately interwoven, as almost to make a solid wall about one. Then
the atmosphere was so close and airless that a fear of suffocation
combined at once with the other fear of being swallowed up in all this
savage green life, without hope of finding one's way out again into the
sun. I had fought my way in but a very few yards when both these fears
clutched hold of me with a sudden horror, and the perspiration poured
from me; I could no longer distinguish between the way I had come and
any other part of the wood! Indeed, there was no way anywhere!

It was now only a question of sturdy fighting and squirming one's way
through the meshes of a gigantic basketwork of every variety of
fantastic branch and stem and stout strangling thorn-set vine, made the
denser with snaky roots--not merely twisting about one's feet, but
dropping from the boughs in nooses and festoons for one's neck;
air-plants too, like birds' nests, further choking up the meshes, and
hanging moss, like rotting carpets, adding still more to the murk and
curious squalor of a foul fertility where beauty, like humanity, found
it impossible to breathe.

I must have battled through this veritable inferno of vegetation for at
least an hour--though it seemed a life-time. Clouds of particularly
unpleasant midges filled my eyes, not to speak of mosquitoes, and a
peculiar kind of persistent stinging fly was adding to my miseries, when
at last, begrimed and dripping with sweat, I stumbled out, with a cry of
thankfulness, on to comparatively fresh air, and something like a broad
avenue running north and south through the wood. It was indeed densely
overgrown, and had evidently not been used for many years. Still, it was
comparatively passable, and one could at least see the sky, and take
long breaths once more.

The rock here emerged again in places through the scanty soil, but it
had evidently been levelled here and there, so as to make it serve as a
rough but practicable road, though plainly it was years since any
vehicles had passed that way. Still, there was no sign of a house
anywhere. Presently, however, as I stumbled along, I noticed something
looming darkly through the matted forest on my left, that