I Am Speaking From
Sad Experiences Of My Own, Amplified By Observations On The
Experiences Of My Men.
The path, when we get down again into the tree-fern region, is
inches deep in mud and water,
And several places where we have a
drop of five feet or so over lumps of rock are worse work going down
than we found them going up, especially when we have to drop down on
to amomum stems. One abominable place, a V-shaped hollow, mud-
lined, and with an immense tree right across it - a tree one of our
tornadoes has thrown down since we passed - bothers the men badly, as
they slip and scramble down, and then crawl under the tree and slip
and scramble up with their loads. I say nothing about myself. I
just take a flying slide of twenty feet or so and shoot flump under
the tree on my back, and then deliberate whether it is worth while
getting up again to go on with such a world; but vanity forbids my
dying like a dog in a ditch, and I scramble up, rejoining the others
where they are standing on a cross-path: our path going S.E. by E.,
the other S.S.W. Two men have already gone down the S.W. one, which
I feel sure is the upper end of the path Sasu had led us to and
wasted time on our first day's march; the middle regions of which
were, as we had found from its lower end, impassable with
vegetation.
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