up the estuary mouth I should have entered. Not a sign of an opening
showed anywhere, and having nothing whatever for guidance I turned
northward, eagerly scanning an endless line of low cliffs, as the day
lessened, for the promised sand-bar or inlet.

About dusk my canoe, flying swiftly forward at its own sweet will, brought
me into a bight, a bare, desolate-looking country with no vegetation save
grass and sedge on the near marshes and stony hills rising up beyond,
with others beyond them mounting step by step to a long line of ridges
and peaks still covered in winter snow.

The outlook was anything but cheering. Not a trace of habitation had been
seen for a long time, not a single living being in whose neighbourhood I
could land and ask the way; nothing living anywhere but a monstrous kind
of sea-slug, as big as a dog, battening on the waterside garbage, and
gaunt birds like vultures who croaked on the mud-flats, and half-spread
wings of funereal blackness as they gambolled here and there. Where was
poor Heru? Where pink-shouldered An? Where those wild men who had
taken the princess from us? Lastly, but not least, where was I?

All the first stars of the Martian sky were strange to me, and my boat
whirling round and round on the current confused what little geography
I might otherwise have retained. It was a cheerless look out, and again
and again I cursed my folly for coming on such a fool's errand as I sat,
chin in hand, staring at a landscape that grew more and more depressing
every mile. To go on looked like destruction, to go back was almost
impossible without a guide; and while I was still wondering which of the
two might be the lesser evil, the stream I was on turned a corner, and in
a moment we were upon water which ran with swift, oily smoothness straight
for the snow-ranges now beginning to loom unpleasantly close ahead.