“As you know,” Hanson assured me, “I went out merely to see what would happen to myself, in certain circumstances.  I knew I was going to be scared, and I was.  There is a place called Tabacol on the river, and we anchored there after our ocean passage for more than a week.  I don’t know why, and it was no use asking Purdy.  Probably he didn’t know.  I had made up my mind to make the engines move and stop, whenever ordered, and then see where we are.  Anyway, after the racket of the sea voyage, when the engines stopped at Tabacol the utter silence was as if something which had been waiting there for you at once pounced.  The quiet was of an awful weight.  I could hardly breathe, and chanced to look at the thermometer.  It stood at 132 degrees.  I don’t know how I got outside, but when I came to I was on my back on deck, and Jessie was looking after me.  I remember wondering then how a big, fleshy woman like her could stand it, and felt almost as sorry for her as I did for myself.”

“Did she look ill?”

“Jessie?  Oh, I don’t know.  She looked as if she might have been having a merrier time.  Well, we left Tabacol, and I felt we were leaving everything we knew behind us.  I got the idea, in the first day on the river, that we were quite lost, and were only pushing the old Cygnet along to keep up our spirits.  We crawled close under the walls of the forest.  Our vessel looked about as large and important as a leaf adrift.  That place is so immense that I saw we were going to make no impression on it.  It wouldn’t matter to anybody but ourselves if it swallowed us up.  On the first day I saw a round head and two yellow eyes in it, watching us go by.  The thought went through my mind:  ‘a jaguar.’  The watching face vanished on the instant, and I always felt afterwards that the forest knew all about us, but wouldn’t let us know anything.  I got the idea that it wasn’t of the least use going on, unless we didn’t intend to treat the job seriously.  If we were serious about it then it was evident we ought to turn back.”

“Didn’t the skipper ever say what he thought of it?”

“What could Purdy think, or do?  There was that river, and the forest on both sides of it, and the sun over us.  Nothing else but the quiet; and we didn’t know where our destination was.  We anchored every evening, close to the bank.  One evening, as we anchored, a shower of arrows clattered about us.  There was just one shower, out of the trees, or out of the clouds.”

“What was Jessie doing all this time?” I ventured to ask him.

“Why, what was any one doing?  She wasn’t an anxiety of my department.  I suppose she was there for the only reason I had—­because she asked for it.  It was the same next day, except that instead of more arrows we found a python in the bunkers.  Came aboard over the hawsers, I suppose.  We were a lively lunatic asylum below while killing it with fire-shovels and crowbars.  That was what the voyage was like.  The whole lot of it was the same, and you knew quite well that the farther you went the less anything mattered.  There were slight variations each day of snakes, mosquitoes, and fevers, to keep you from feeling dead already.”