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.
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