he heels of Hair-Face and his
wife. When we came to the edge of the great swamp, we stopped. We did
not know its paths. It was outside our territory, and it had been always
avoided by the Folk. None had ever gone into it--at least, to return.
In our minds it represented mystery and fear, the terrible unknown. As
I say, we stopped at the edge of it. We were afraid. The cries of the
Fire-Men were drawing nearer. We looked at one another. Hair-Face
ran out on the quaking morass and gained the firmer footing of a
grass-hummock a dozen yards away. His wife did not follow. She tried to,
but shrank back from the treacherous surface and cowered down.

The Swift One did not wait for me, nor did she pause till she had passed
beyond Hair-Face a hundred yards and gained a much larger hummock. By
the time Lop-Ear and I had caught up with her, the Fire-Men appeared
among the trees. Hair-Face's wife, driven by them into panic terror,
dashed after us. But she ran blindly, without caution, and broke through
the crust. We turned and watched, and saw them shoot her with arrows as
she sank down in the mud. The arrows began falling about us. Hair-Face
had now joined us, and the four of us plunged on, we knew not whither,
deeper and deeper into the swamp.

CHAPTER XVIII

Of our wanderings in the great swamp I have no clear knowledge. When I
strive to remember, I have a riot of unrelated impressions and a loss of
time-value. I have no idea of how long we were in that vast everglade,
but it must have been for weeks. My memories of what occurred invariably
take the form of nightmare. For untold ages, oppressed by protean fear,
I am aware of wandering, endlessly wandering, through a dank and soggy
wilderness, where poisonous snakes struck at us, and animals roared
around us, and the mud quaked under us and sucked at our heels.

I know that we were turned from our course countless times by streams
and lakes and slimy seas. Then there were storms and risings of the
water over great areas of the low-lying lands; and there were periods of
hunger and misery when we were kept prisoners in the trees for days and
days by these transient floods.

Very strong upon me is one picture. Large trees are about us, and from
their branches hang gray filaments of moss, while great creepers, like
monstrous serpents, curl around the trunks and writhe in tangles through
the air. And all about is the mud, soft mud, that bubbles forth gases,
and that heave