a patch of sand on the left bank of the river. We jumped out and started erecting our tents and making preparations for the night, Chatsworth cooking the meal and the rest of us pitching the tents and setting up mosquito - nets. We had also one large net on four poles, under which Chatsworth and I took our evening meal. Across the river there was a big post, to which we were informed an Indian had tied his unfaithful bride. He tied her naked, and left her there till the morning. She was dead when he arrived. The sting of myriads of mosquitoes had done its work. Sitting there eating our food we felt that after all Mosquitia wasn't such a bad place. There was hardly a mosquito, but when the sun made its final dip and darkness sprang upon us, we heard a sound which chilled our blood. The mosquitoes bore down in a cloud. We blew out the lights, left the pots and pans and washingup for the morning, dived into our tents and under our nets, a batch of mosquitoes with us. Then the battle began, spotting them with our electric torches and slapping them flat between our hands. Those already drunk with our blood were easy victims, but the others who had not yet indulged were harder to catch. jungles, no jeopardy, no mosquitoes, just man-and so to sleep. Early, about 4.30, next morning we had to rise. That's the hell of it: the damnable dawn, when the mosquito redoubles his activities. If you are wise you dress in bed under your net; then one, two, three, and out of your tent, laying about you with a good big towel. Now you perform your itchy ablutions at the water's edge. The cleansing of pots and pans-all hands together and finish with the packingat last the sun, and finished with the pest-and finally the Patuca and the paddles, for we were now leaving the tributary and joining the main river. Another day of silent swift waters, a pitiless sun, and sweating exertions, paddling amongst those ebony creatures with their lithe bodies gleaming with perspiration. "Thank heaven I have served an apprenticeship on the Thames!" I thought. That latissimus dorsi, these pectorals, that biceps, had all been trained and responded to the call. Chatsworth, pert and fiery, kept the pace with his never-flagging energy. The old sun fairly blinked at us with amazement. White men, he seemed to say! I'll burn the blighters! he did. But no matter. We won our race against time and tide; but oh! the sweat of it, and our goal, our reward, what was it to be? A sandbank in the middle of the river, bifurcated by swift waters. Our And tents erected, we sat there in the silence of the wilds. We might have been the only people in the world. We were in that world, until we suddenly saw a canoe appearing; and by gosh! a white man in the stern with his tawny and dark-eyed queen. The current bore him swiftly towards us, and he deftly brought his canoe to a standstill alongside our sandy home. We went forward to meet him. "My mate's chasing me down this accursed river, mad son of a gun he is! Tried to shoot me last night, but I've got his revolver. See? And he held the shining barrel up to us. "Been too long in the wilds. Don't know why they send them sort out here. Ought to be with his wife and kiddies away home in Kentucky. The silence kills 'em, I guess. God strike me dead if he ain't as mad as a hatter." "Have a drink," Chatsworth urged. "Don't mind if I do. Ah, that's better." Then he saw the girl smiling at us with her ivory teeth, gave the canoe a vicious push, and was gone. "It's just like a cinema, isn't it?" I breathed. Chatsworth laughed, and we sat awaiting the second act. It wasn't long in coming. There it was rounding the bend already. Another canoe, another white man, and another dark-eyed queen. 'Seen my mate? "he glared, as he brought the canoe to rest; and certainly something 66 'Come, have another drink. You'll be all right. You'll be back in civilisation soon," I encouraged. And he gulped down another; then, still with that half-crazy expression, he glanced round as if by instinct, more smiling white ivory teeth in an ebony setting, and pushed off without another word. Girls will be girls, and the black and tan are as tiresome as the white, at least so he thought. They had been sent out to explore for suitable bananagrowing country, and the wilderness had proved too much for one of them. A man must keep a tight hold on his mind if he would endure the silence of those lonely wastes. Another battle with mosquitoes in the morning, and then away up the river until about noon, when we landed at a spot on the right bank, cursing the fact that our petrol launch had not arrived in time to save us all this exertion. Moreover, we ought to explore much farther up the Patuca. However, we decided to cut across the country now and return to the river later. We didn't know what instructions to give the crew, because we knew nothing of that trackless waste beyond, which we were now about to penetrate. We might, if we could get there, push a traverse right through to the Wanks, or, as it is sometimes called, the Segovia, the largest river in Central America, which forms the frontier for many a league between Spanish Honduras and Nicaragua. On the other hand, we might be forced to return to the Patuca within a few days, and the crews would not wait indefinitely. Paddling was all very well, but not too much of it. They preferred poodlefaking. And that's just where Mosquitia gets you down. You must constantly change your method of transport. Other countries seem to provide the requisite animal-the camel for the desert sands, mules for the mountains, but in Mosquitia merely the mosquito. The punishment in that country fits the crime. We decided sleep on this knotty problem. The next morning we were pondering deeply on what would be the wisest course to take, when suddenly the stillness of the forest was broken by the regular and unmistakable beats of a motor. launch at last. to Ye gods! our And we pushed our way impatiently through the trees, slid down the slippery bank, there to behold it puffing majestically up the river. All the way from the island of Roatan it had come. The first launch they sent us had been swamped. This was a 5-tonner, but with rather too deep a draught for these shallow rivers. Never mind; we could now get down the river quick enough, if we couldn't get any farther up it. Meantime we had already arranged our trip across country, and decided to do that first. Leaving two cases of food with the launch, we started off next morning with carriers to an Indian encampment. Roatan had arranged for horses. They had been grazing, and the Indians were now bringing them in, although I may say there was precious little to graze. They, of course, brought these poor half-nourished brutes in at the gallop, and merely tired them out before the journey started. I gave a little Indian boy a fifty centavo piece, but Roatan, fearing that he'd swallow it, took it away from him quickly. Then we presented them with salt, tobacco, beads, and they gave us apples which grew on some stumpy trees, and which, with the exception of a few beans, were about the only edible things in that barren country. Now for that swampy land at the back of the great Caratasca lagoon, a huge sheet of coastal water some twenty miles wide and over fifty miles long. All that day we rode through animals, no human beings exopen country. It's only round tropical rivers and valleys that the dense bush lies thick. With perhaps a copse here and there, savannah lands are clear, wide, open spaces, but in this neighbourhood with a thick alluvial covering. The geology thus lay hidden. Nothing but a physical or magnetic survey would have revealed the underlying strata, and we hadn't either the instruments or the facilities to undertake it, SO we wandered on, hoping for a rock prominence, or what geologists term a piece of solid geology, to give us the clue to hidden structures. Alas! there was nothing to be seen. At night we chose a spot right open to the four winds of heaven. There were only a few trees on the whole of that rolling plain. We didn't want any more. We just slung our hammocks up in the glorious breeze and drank in the balmy air. Not a mosquito ! No cept ourselves. Not a sound; for only nature and the nomad inhabit the prairies, flitting from place to place. You see neither, but you sense both. A presence seems to dominate these farflung plains. Man may own the land, or even what is beneath it, but as a great philosopher said, no one owns the landscape, and in these silent nights I flung my mind open to its influence. It's no use just to see the landscape as the trippers do, and defile it with their litter. You must feel it. It must, as it were, pass through you, pervade you, dispel those irritating trivialities of the troubled traveller and soothe you, then sleep will not flirt with you and tease your tired senses. It will not approach you as a faun, but spring like a tiger upon you, snap! and you'll be gone into a blissful oblivion until the morning star and the trumpet call of dawn! (To be concluded.) SOME ROGUES AND MULES. BY PERCY GAISFORD. THERE is a certain prejudice against rogues in fiction, except when given their proper values -that is, we are told, when used to point a moral; but in this tale there is no moral, except perhaps that the greatest rogue acquired the largest share of the loot, which, contrary to the accepted precepts of good fiction-sound healthy stuffis often true to life. But this is not fiction. The four men sitting round a barrel in the old weatherworn barn, half store, half stable, of a farm in Seine-etOise, were rogues; but that in no way prevented them from being, in their way, very good fellows. After all, a rogue may be anything from a vagrant and dishonest person to a sly fellow or wag-the word, the dictionary maintains, may also be used as a term of endearment -so you can have it any way you like. But as this is no more an essay on rogues than fiction, we will get on with the four sly fellows, who, besides sitting round a barrel, were in fact using it as a card tablethe game was Manille, the French soldiers' equivalent of Bridge. The regiment was at rest, and the subject of discussion, in the intervals of a not I. very absorbing game, was lack of cash; and there were things to be done by anybody with sufficient of the commodity. "One might sell something," said Santoni the Italian. "There is nothing in this cursed place to pinch," Balthazar the Brazilian interposed. Demironda, a tall Portuguese, the youngest of the four, said it was up to them to get themselves out of the fog-faut se débrouiller. Bourget, a Frenchman, originally of the south before Morocco claimed him after a peccadillo in his native town, was the first to pierce the mist : One might sell one of those dirty beasts," was his contribution to the discussion, pointing to the company mules kicking the flies off at the other end of the barn. "And get six months in the disciplinary section for one's trouble without any wine," grumbled Santoni. They were typical of the Legion-that is, the Legion of Moroccan days: hard bitten enough, natives of four different corners of the globe, they had, by a process of evolution, become stamped with the same mark. They talked the same language jargon of the Legion, half French, half slang,-had |