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Updated: May 15, 2025
After a little she sat down, her back against a tree-trunk, her face toward the distant view.... Presently a big green oak leaf fluttered down past her eyes, and fell into her lap. "That's odd," she thought, and looked up. Nothing could be seen but the great limbs, rugged with years, of the oak beneath which she sat. She looked off again at the view.
And so, leading our tired horses, we went cheerily down the mountain side in Indian file, hopping and slipping from ledge to mud and mud to ledge, and calling a halt every five minutes to look at some fresh curiosity: now a tree-fern, now a climbing fern; now some huge tree-trunk, whose name was only to be guessed at; now a fresh armadillo-burrow; now a parasol-ants' warren, which had to be avoided lest horse and man should sink in it knee-deep, and come out sorely bitten; now some glimpse of sea and forest far below; now we cut a water-vine, and had a long cool drink; now a great moth had to be hunted, if not caught; or a toucan or some other strange bird listened to; or an eagle watched as he soared high over the green gulf.
With eyes closed, he collapsed against the nearest tree-trunk. Laurie followed him, expecting some treacherous move; but all the fight seemed out of the serpent. He was clutching at his coat and collar as if not yet able to breathe. "I've had enough of this," he finally gasped out. "I'll tell you everything."
On the night of the 24th a tree-trunk was reported, but when morning came nothing further was seen.
The prince next day did exactly as the princess had told him; and the minute the hair that was stretched down the edge of the hatchet-blade touched the tree-trunk it split into two pieces. The king said, "Now you can marry my daughter." Then the wedding took place. All the Rajas and kings of the countries round were asked to come to it, and there were great rejoicings.
Now a procession of ants appeared, from nowhere in particular, and went about their labors; one struggled manfully by with a dead spider five times as big as itself in its arms, and lugged it straight up a tree-trunk.
Though, when one says lack of agility, it is fair to add that only a very swiftly moving creature could have escaped the two hounds at all; and, once it reached a tree-trunk, this reptile showed simply wonderful cleverness in climbing, running up fifty feet of iron-bark trunk as quickly as it could cover the level ground, and keeping always on the far side of the tree from the dogs, its long, ugly, wedge-shaped head constantly turning from side to side, in keen, listening observation.
Twigs and leaves pattered down, but I was safe behind the stump of a fallen tree. Presently the steel thing I had seen glinting struck the dead and sodden wood of the tree-trunk, and snapped with a sharp tang like a fiddle-string a hayfork it may have been, or one of the long thin swords such as are hung up in the hall.
Dwarf pines were numerous upon the hills and partly fringed the outer verge of the intermediate hollow, within which there was nothing but the brown grass of October and here and there a tree-trunk that had fallen long ago and lay mouldering with no green successor from its roots.
"He does not advertise his whereabouts as freely as do the Woodpeckers and other tree-trunk birds, so you will have to keep a sharp lookout to find him.
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