As far as the eye could pierce into the tangled thicket, the roots interlaced with each other, and arched down into the water in innumerable curves, by no means devoid of grace, but hideous just because they were impenetrable.

Who could get over those roots, or through the scrub which stood stilted on them, letting down at every yard or two fresh air-roots from off its boughs, to add fresh tangle, as they struck into the mud, to the horrible imbroglio?
If one had got in among them, I fancied, one would never have got out again.

Struggling over and under endless trap-work, without footing on it or on the mud below, one must have sunk exhausted in an hour or two, to die of fatigue and heat, or chill and fever.
Let the mangrove foliage be as gay and green as it may--and it is gay and green--a mangrove swamp is a sad, ugly, evil place; and so I felt that one to be that day.
The only moving things were some large fish, who were leaping high out of water close to the bushes, glittering in the sun.

They stopped as we came up: and then all was still, till a slate-blue heron {122a} rose lazily off a dead bough, flapped fifty yards up the creek, and then sat down again.

The only sound beside the rattle of our oars was the metallic note of a pigeon in the high tree, which I mistook then and afterwards for the sound of a horn.
On we rowed, looking out sharply right and left for an alligator basking on the mud among the mangrove roots.