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This road has been carried for several leagues over swampy lands, which are intersected by deep drains to carry off the water. The road from Aguadilla to Mayaguez is in some parts very good, in other parts only fair. From Aguadilla to Aguada, a distance of a league, the road is excellent and level.
The way led down through a swampy hollow, which was overflowed by the Berande River on occasion, and where the red trail of the murderers was crossed by a crocodile's trail. They had apparently caught the creature asleep in the sun and desisted long enough from their flight to hack him to pieces. Here the wounded man had sat down and waited until they were ready to go on.
Madonna Pia, whose husband, feeling himself injured by her, took her to his castle amid the swampy flats of the Maremma and got rid of her there, makes a pathetic figure in Dante's Purgatory, among the sinners who repented at the last and desire to be remembered compassionately by their fellow-countrymen.
At times, again, it was necessary to plunge back into the humming and steaming gloom behind this resplendent screen, in order to make a détour around some swampy cove, whose dense growth of sedge, fifteen to twenty feet in height, was traversed by wide trails which showed it to be the abode of unfamiliar monsters.
It is approximately six miles long, has an average width of one mile, and resembles a little in shape a huge comma, with the city of Key West for its head and a diminishing curve of low, swampy chaparral and mangrove-bushes for a tail. The shallow bay of pale-green water between the head and the tail on the concave side of the comma is known as "the bight."
Then there are chains of lakes, often several miles in length, acres of swampy ground in every direction, shallow ravines filled with a jumble of rocks and boulders, and constant sand mounds, partly overgrown with grass and dwarf juniper. And up here are the snowfields, about which we shall have more to say presently.
We had six or seven miles of unknown wilderness to traverse, a portion of it swampy, in which a progress of more than a mile an hour is difficult, and the condition of the guide compelled even a slower march. What should we do in that lonesome solitude if the guide became disabled? We couldn't carry him out; could we find our own way out to get assistance?
When Brummy and Swampy came to a shed where shearing was in full swing, they'd inquire, first thing, and with some show of anxiety, if there was any chance of gettin' on; if the shed was full-handed they'd growl about hard times, wonder what the country was coming to; talk of their missuses and kids that they'd left in Sydney, curse the squatters and the Government, and, next morning, get a supply of rations from the cook and depart with looks of gloom.
But Mary, who, Indian like, was wise and observant, only said, "Wait a minute or two and I will show you." Then she quickly hurried back into a swampy place and soon returned with a thick juicy leaf, to the under side of which several mosquitoes were still clinging, with their bodies distended with its juice.
Wretched mud farm-buildings; a swampy yard; a low dwelling-house with a shingle roof, from the walls of which the chalk had crumbled down and showed the bare wall underneath; a wilderness of a garden, in which the last sad remains of the summer asters and sunflowers stood among half- decayed vegetables, round about a gaudy painted fence, which seemed to have received extreme unction just before its end this was the place where the family of the ruined squire had to live henceforth.
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