"Is it the
Atlantic or the Pacific or one I ain't heard tell of a-tall, a-tall? But
which ever it is, I'm Christopher Columbus the second, on my way to
discover a new continent bigger than all the others put together! Jumpin'
Jehoshaphat! but that was a narrow escape! It made my flesh creep!"
Sol had shifted the boat in her course, just in time to escape an ominous
snag, but in a moment his joyousness came back, and without giving Paul
time to answer, he continued:
"A boat goin' down stream on a river is shorely the right way o' travelin'
fur a lazy man like me. I wish it wuz all like this!"
The violence of the rain abated somewhat in an hour or so, but it
continued to come down for a long time. Far after midnight the clouds
began to part. A damp patch of sky showed, but it was clear sky
nevertheless and soon it broadened.
The flooded world rose up before the five voyagers, the vast river, still
black in the night light, floating trees, perhaps rooted up by the stream
from shores thousands of miles to the north and west, the low dim outline
of forest to right and left, and all around them an immense desolation.
Everything to other minds would have been gigantic, somber, and menacing.
Gigantic it was to the five, but neither somber nor menacing.
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