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Soon, a line of gleaming steel was seen above the dense undergrowth in Lauman's front. It advanced steadily till about one hundred yards from his line. A sheet of fire blazed from the front of the brigade. The men, restrained till then, fired rapidly but coolly. The fire could not be resisted or endured.
It was not over a hundred feet in width, but he noticed that there was a very distinct path that had been beaten through the undergrowth. The discovery for a moment startled him. Then he realized that the woods were, of course, full of all sorts of harmless animals, who had to come down to the water to drink. This would explain the beaten path, and in some measure it reassured him.
The undergrowth gave me much trouble, and once I had to make a circuit round a huge rhododendron; but I fought my way through, and after going, as I reckoned, thirty-two paces, pulled up full in front of another rhododendron. "There must be some mistake.
He came to a wide white place that was almost level, and beyond it under clustering pale-stemmed trees shone the mirror surface of some ancient tank, and, sharp and black, a dog-like beast sat on its tail in the midst of this space, started convulsively and went slinking into the undergrowth.
It did not reach its tall objective, but fell among the undergrowth, shaking up a flying litter of birds. But in the poet's memory, full of primal things, something seemed to say that he had seen the birds of some pagan augury, the ax of some pagan sacrifice. A moment after the man made a heavy movement forward, as if to recover his tool; but the doctor put a hand on his arm.
To begin with, the trees were all of new and strange species, mostly bearing foliage of dark and gloomy tints; they stood much farther apart; the undergrowth was sparse, or absent altogether; and there were no orchids, or long, trailing garlands of lovely parasitic growth which had rendered the forests already traversed so strangely beautiful.
They were little detached sounds, as if an insect would start out to sing its song, and then suddenly think better of it; and even when some large animal made its presence known by the snapping of a branch, or a sudden scurry in the undergrowth, the noise ceased almost as soon as it began. "It gives me the creeps," muttered Venning, after a long silence.
He went carefully along the low, wooded shores, keeping well in the undergrowth, which was dense, and for an hour he heard and saw nothing of the Sioux. He knew why. They were still rejoicing over their great victory, and although he knew little of Indian customs he believed that the scalp dance must be in progress. The moon and stars came out.
Soon there were endless pine forests on every hand, with a thick, oak-like undergrowth. A labyrinth of loops one above another brought us to Ajambaran and a bit of level track, with no mountains in the landscape because we stood on the summit of them. Little Lake Zirahuen, surrounded on all sides by sloping hills, half pine, half corn, gleamed with an emerald blue.
In 1728, when Colonel William Byrd, of Westover, was running the boundary line between Virginia and North Carolina, he finally was repulsed by parallel chains of savage, unpeopled mountains that rose tier beyond tier to the westward, everywhere densely forested, and matted into jungle by laurel and other undergrowth.
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