'Must I be all day, catching my death
in this vile slough, and all for a prating slave-girl?'
I took the blow in silence, I took it smiling; but the blood welled
back upon my heart. Something, I know not what, fell at that
moment with a dull plunge in the waters of the lagoon, and I told
myself it was my pity that had fallen.
On the farther side, to which we now hastily scrambled, the wood
was not so dense, the web of creepers not so solidly convolved. It
was possible, here and there, to mark a patch of somewhat brighter
daylight, or to distinguish, through the lighter web of parasites,
the proportions of some soaring tree. The cypress on the left
stood very visibly forth, upon the edge of such a clearing; the
path in that place widened broadly; and there was a patch of open
ground, beset with horrible ant-heaps, thick with their artificers.
I laid down the tools and basket by the cypress root, where they
were instantly blackened over with the crawling ants; and looked
once more in the face of my unconscious victim. Mosquitoes and
foul flies wove so close a veil between us that his features were
obscured; and the sound of their flight was like the turning of a
mighty wheel.
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