So the next morning, bright and early, we started work, I letting Tom take Sailor with him as company and protection against the spirits of the waste; also we took a revolver apiece and cartridge belts, and it seemed to me that the old fellow showed no 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 and I returned home dead-beat, with hardly a tired word to exchange with each other.

We had now been at it for about a fortnight, and I loved the old chap more every day for the grit and courage with which he supported our terrible labours and kept up his spirits.  We had long since passed out of sight of each other, and much time was necessarily wasted by our going to and from the place where we left off each day.  Many a time I hallooed to the old man to keep his heart up, and received back his cheery halloo far and far away.