The night was stifling and pitch-dark--so dark, indeed, that each man had to hold on to the wallet of his comrade in front so as not to lose his way. Thus progress was very slow. When we had been walking about an hour, and had covered, perhaps, a mile and a half, the blackness of the night was of a sudden lit up by a brilliant flash of lightning which illuminated, for the fraction of a second, the surrounding country. The weird aspect of it, with the tall outlines of the palms and bamboo silhouetted against the sky, remained with a strange vividness as if photographed upon the retina, for several minutes. This was succeeded by a peal of thunder so deafening that it seemed to split the ear-drums and shake the ground beneath us, and the rain came down as it only can do in the tropics. For a few seconds our little troop was thrown into confusion, and some of the men, temporarily blinded by the sudden light, stepped into the fields, where they floundered about with water and mud almost up to their knees. After this interruption we proceeded on our way. Very slowly though, for the lightning continued, flash following flash, in quick succession for an hour, and our ears were weary with the crashing of the thunder. The track, which was of clay, was sodden and slippery. We were all wet through to the skin, and our boots, full of water, emitted a curious squashing noise at each step. Fortunately the din of the thunder and the continued thresh of the rain more than covered the noisy advance of our column. Ten minutes before, wet through with perspiration, I had mentally cursed the heat; now my teeth were chattering and my fingers were numbed with the cold. I felt a strange joy at it, smiled to myself at the evident truth of Tho's recent prophecy anent the "great waters," and thought how appropriate was his term for the downpour. For two hours we continued on our slippery way, and were then halted on a patch of grass covered with little mounds--a village graveyard. Here our expedition was broken up into little parties, the one to which I belonged being composed of ten Legionaries and a sergeant, and as many _tirailleurs_, with Tho at their head. We proceeded a short distance, and were ordered to be down in some long grass, behind a clump of cactus and hibiscus shrubs. As we did so, I heard the _Doy_ say to our sergeant: "When it will be light we shall see the door of the village from here; the path to it is a little to our left." From this, and the movements I could hear on our right and left, I gathered that the remainder of the column was surrounding a village which lay before us, but owing to the darkness and the rain I could distinguish nothing ahead of me. We had been lying on the ground some minutes, and, notwithstanding the chill dampness, I was almost falling into a doze, for the walk had tired me, when from the surrounding darkness a figure came noiselessly and crouched beside me. The next instant Tho's voice whispered in my ear: