“When the man had buried his comrade in the sand,” Florent continued slowly, “he walked off alone straight in front of him.  Dutch Guiana, in which country he now was, is a land of forests intermingled with rivers and swamps.  The man walked on for more than a week without coming across a single human dwelling-place.  All around, death seemed to be lurking and lying in wait for him.  Though his stomach was racked by hunger, he often did not dare to eat the bright-coloured fruits which hung from the trees; he was afraid to touch the glittering berries, fearing lest they should be poisonous.  For whole days he did not see a patch of sky, but tramped on beneath a canopy of branches, amidst a greenish gloom that swarmed with horrible living creatures.  Great birds flew over his head with a terrible flapping of wings and sudden strange calls resembling death groans; apes sprang, wild animals rushed through the thickets around him, bending the saplings and bringing down a rain of leaves, as though a gale were passing.  But it was particularly the serpents that turned his blood cold when, stepping upon a matting of moving, withered leaves, he caught sight of their slim heads gliding amidst a horrid maze of roots.  In certain nooks, nooks of dank shadow, swarming colonies of reptiles—­some black, some yellow, some purple, some striped, some spotted, and some resembling withered reeds—­suddenly awakened into life and wriggled away.  At such times the man would stop and look about for a stone on which he might take refuge from the soft yielding ground into which his feet sank; and there he would remain for hours, terror-stricken on espying in some open space near by a boa, who, with tail coiled and head erect, swayed like the trunk of a big tree splotched with gold.

“At night he used to sleep in the trees, alarmed by the slightest rustling of the branches, and fancying that he could hear endless swarms of serpents gliding through the gloom.  He almost stifled beneath the interminable expanse of foliage.  The gloomy shade reeked with close, oppressive heat, a clammy dankness and pestilential sweat, impregnated with the coarse aroma of scented wood and malodorous flowers.

“And when at last, after a long weary tramp, the man made his way out of the forest and beheld the sky again, he found himself confronted by wide rivers which barred his way.  He skirted their banks, keeping a watchful eye on the grey backs of the alligators and the masses of drifting vegetation, and then, when he came to a less suspicious-looking spot, he swam across.  And beyond the rivers the forests began again.  At other times there were vast prairie lands, leagues of thick vegetation, in which, at distant intervals, small lakes gleamed bluely.  The man then made a wide detour, and sounded the ground beneath him before advancing, having but narrowly escaped from being swallowed up and buried beneath one of those smiling plains which he could hear cracking at each step he took.  The giant grass, nourished