"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.

Instead it told them of safety and comfort and it was, at all times, full of a varied and supreme interest.
As soon as the light was strong enough for them to find a suitable place they pulled the boat among the trees on the western shore and tied it up securely.