In some quarters,
a snake or zigzag fence had been begun, but in no instance had it been
completed; and the felled logs, half hidden in the soil, lay mouldering
away. Three or four meagre dogs, wasted and vexed with hunger; some
long-legged pigs, wandering away into the woods in search of food; some
children, nearly naked, gazing at him from the huts; were all the living
things he saw. A fetid vapour, hot and sickening as the breath of an
oven, rose up from the earth, and hung on everything around; and as his
foot-prints sunk into the marshy ground, a black ooze started forth to
blot them out.
Their own land was mere forest. The trees had grown so think and close
that they shouldered one another out of their places, and the weakest,
forced into shapes of strange distortion, languished like cripples.
The best were stunted, from the pressure and the want of room; and high
about the stems of all grew long rank grass, dank weeds, and frowsy
underwood; not divisible into their separate kinds, but tangled all
together in a heap; a jungle deep and dark, with neither earth nor water
at its roots, but putrid matter, formed of the pulpy offal of the two,
and of their own corruption.
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