The Espriella, of course, lay head-to-tide, and the tide by this time was making strongly—­so strongly that I had no time to get steerage way on the little boat before it swept her close under the open porthole through which I heard Miss Belcher inviting Mr. Goodfellow to pass his plate for another dumpling.  Miss Belcher’s voice—­as I may or may not have informed the reader—­was a baritone of singularly resonant timbre.  It sounded through the porthole as through a speaking trumpet, and I ducked and held my breath as the boat’s gunwale rubbed twice against the schooner’s side before drifting clear.

Once clear, however, I worked my paddle with a will, though noiselessly; and, the tide helping me, soon reached and rounded the first bend.  Here, out of sight of the ship, I had leisure to draw breath and look about me.

Ahead of me lay a still reach, close upon half a mile in length, and narrowing steadily to the next bend, when the two shores overlapped and mingled their reflections on the water.  On my right the red cliffs, their summits matted with creepers, descended sheer into water many fathoms deep, yet so clear that I could spy the fish playing about their bases where they met the firm white sand.  On my left the channel shoaled gradually to a beach of this same white sand, which followed the curve of the shore, here and again flashing out into broad sunshine from the blue shadow cast by the overhanging forest.

Between these banks the breeze could scarcely be felt, yet, though the sun scorched me, the heat was not oppressive.  The woods, dense and tangled though they were, threw up no exhalations of mud or rotting leaves, but a clean, aromatic odour.  It seemed to give them a substance without which they had been but a mirage, a scene painted on a cloth, so motionless and apparently lifeless they stood, with the long vines hanging from their boughs, and the hot, rarefied air quivering above them.

At first their silence daunted me; by-and-by I felt (I could hardly be said to hear) that this silence was intense, and held a sound of its own, a murmur as of millions of flies and minute winged things—­ or perhaps it came from the vegetation itself, and the sap pushing leaf against leaf and ceaselessly striving for room.

With scarcely more noise than the forest made in growing, I let the cockboat float up on the tide, correcting her course from time to time with a touch of the paddle astern; and so coming to the second bend, began to search the shore for a convenient landing.  The Captain and Mr. Rogers, no doubt, had rowed up to the very head of the creek, and would by this time be prospecting for the clump of trees which were the key to unlock No. 3 cache.  To escape—­or, at any rate, delay—­detection, I must land lower down, and preferably at some point where I could pull up the boat and hide it.