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To make matters worse, the route became swampy. Sometimes the horses sank nearly hock-deep in mud, which in the pitch darkness they could not avoid. In such places it required the force of thirty men to drag the gun, and the delays became serious.
It is easy to imagine the total want of beauty in such a landscape; but yet the form and hue of the trees and plants, so new to us, added to the long privation we had endured of all sights and sounds of land, made even these swampy shores seem beautiful.
Yo' ain't accustomed to the So'th'n sun, and the air in the hollow WAS swampy." As he made a slight gesture of denial, she went on with a pretty sisterly superiority: "That's the way of yo' No'th'n men. Yo' think yo' can do everything just as if yo' were reared to it, and yo' never make allowance for different climates, different blood, and different customs. That's where yo' slip up."
All her movements were buoyant and free, like those of a healthy animal let loose in pleasant pastures. She walked so lightly that the eggs in the handkerchief were scarcely stirred. "See that little swampy patch!" she said, stopping when they had rounded the curve in the road. "A week or two ago, that was all alive with redbud flowers. I dunno the right name on 'em, an' I don't care.
On the skirts of the tobacco plantations and in the swampy malarial region where the ground never gets dry I slept beside bonfires. I learned of the natives to safeguard against fever by placing withered leaves on bark or wilted bracken leaves between myself and the ground. At a little settlement called Olginka I slept on an accumulation of logs outside the village church.
The river was here a fine, broad, deep, and tranquil stream; trees of many kinds fringed the edge, beyond was the unbroken forest, whose depths had never been pierced by the step of man so thick and luxuriant was the vegetation that even the Indian could hardly have penetrated through its dark, swampy glades: far as the eye could reach, that impenetrable, interminable wall of verdure stretched away into the far-off distance.
In the long days of summer, John Clare, who had to start on his errand to the mill late in the afternoon, managed to get home before dark, thus avoiding unpleasant meetings; but when the autumn came, the sun set before he left Maxey, and then the ghosts were upon him. They always attacked him half way between the two villages, in a low swampy spot, overhung by the heavy mist of the fens.
Napoleon III had no sooner entered upon his Mexican campaign than he found that his French troops died like flies in the piece of swampy country between the coast and the City of Mexico. Yet that fever-haunted track must be held, or communication would have been cut between the French troops on the Mexican plateau and the sea.
From Batesville to the southern Missouri border, the road continues for a hundred miles through a dreary solitude of rocky mountains and pine forests, full of snakes and a variety of game, but without the smallest vestige of civilization. There is not a single blade of grass to be found, except in the hollows, and these are too swampy for a horse to venture upon.
On a nearer inspection, however, they proved to be swampy places, and hundreds upon hundreds of little acclivities, sometimes resembling mole-hills, at others small graves, and covered with grass and moss. I could see over an area of at least thirty or forty miles, and yet could not descry a tree or a shrub, a bit of meadow-land or a friendly village. Every thing seemed dead.
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