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For miles and miles together the native traverses this region in his canoe, passing through small streams, lakes, and swamps, scraping the tree trunks, and stooping to pass between the leaves of the prickly palms, now level with the water though raised on stems forty feet high while everywhere round him stretches out an illimitable waste of waters, but all covered with the lofty virgin forest.
Furthermore, the dearth of watersheds within reach of the great cypress swamps on the river borders hampered the use of these which were the most fertile lands in the colony. Beginning about 1783 there was accordingly a general replacement of the reservoir system by the new one of tide-flowing.
Mid-day was long past, and I was still rambling over plains of coarse grass, penetrating into woods, and struggling through swamps; worn almost to death with fatigue and hunger, and the pain of my ankle, now greatly swollen, I sat down at last at the foot of a mahogany-tree in order to gain a little rest.
In Savannah he has taken refuge in a line constructed behind swamps and overflowed rice-fields, extending from a point on the Savannah River about three miles above the city, around by a branch of the Little Ogeechee, which stream is impassable from its salt-marshes and boggy swamps, crossed only by narrow causeways or common corduroy-roads.
It has been asked how, during river inundations capable of sweeping away the leaves of ferns and the stems and roots of Sigillariae and other trees, could the waters fail to transport some fine mud into the swamps?
"Ah, merciful God," answered her mother, "with swamps for a floor, tents that let the water through for shelter, and the cholera killing them by hundreds, and the Moors lying in ambush for them or treacherously following them, and those eternal nights that swallow up the days! There is no strength nor courage that could bear up against so many ills."
Port Royal, notwithstanding its situation at the end of a peninsula, had in old days a terrible reputation for unhealthiness, only surpassed by that of Fort Augusta across the bay, the latter a veritable charnel-house. The neighbourhood of the poisonous swamps of the Rio Cobre was in both cases responsible for the loss of tens of thousands of British soldiers' lives in these two ill-fated spots.
Because all kinds of smoked meat, especially eels, which abounded in all swamps and mud holes, they had in plenty. They treated them liberally, in exchange, holding out greedy hands for the biscuits. There were among them women and children, all blackened from the smoke.
How can you refuse your mother anything when she weeps? Is she not the only woman whom we can never reproach? After all, as you have said, Paris is the wildest desert; there you are completely alone. Indifferent and unknown people may value sands and swamps.
Toiling in their heavy mail, the Germans could make but little effective resistance to the attacks of the Turkish light horse, who were down upon them one instant, and out of sight the next. Now in the front and now in the rear, the agile foe showered his arrows upon them, enticing them into swamps and hollows, from which they could only extricate themselves after long struggles and great losses.
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