If the convict escapes, the French officials don’t care much. He prefers the savage jungle to his savage keeper, fleeing to the bush not half so wild, through fen and flood to Brazil, Dutch and British Guiana. With no weapons for game or hook for fish, they grow mad with hunger, kill each other and have cannibal feasts, for which they are guillotined if captured. To avoid ambush they go in gangs, and when they eat or rest watch the four points of the compass. Just as America had an underground railway between the North and South to aid the fugitive slaves, so in Paramaribo, Dutch Guiana, there are agents of a society formed in France who provide food, clothes and money to aid the convict’s escape. There I was informed that the American Bauxite Company engages escaped convicts, and gives them a chance. However, in holy British Guiana, if caught, they are sent back or given so many days to leave the colony, in which case they often fly to Venezuela. Recently there was a frightful murder in the bush, a man’s head was chopped off and placed in a canoe to shoot the falls in order to cover traces of the crime. But as in Eugene Aram, guilt could not be hidden, for the canoe went over the rapids and falls without spilling its gruesome cargo; it was beached, discovered; the assassins were tracked; and an aeroplane was sent from the penal colony which swooped down on the murderers like a bird of prey and carried them off to prison. Paradoxical as it may seem, the salvation of Cayenne is the convict—he does the work. I talked with a man who employs convicts and he said they were all “good” workers. Many of the other inhabitants, who sweat to get balata and gold, are just as bad outlaws, their life being one guilty round of drink, seduction, cruelty and crime. The colony is full of physical as well as moral lepers. Like the other Guianas, elephantiasis, leprosy and filthy diseases scurf and scourge. The jungles are full of envenomed serpents. As for heat, the country is a few degrees above the equator and many above the boiling point. This dirty land is washed by the Atlantic, although the ocean does not, as Euripides says, wash away the wounds and stain of the world, but rather washes them here from France. Like a New York garbage boat carrying refuse to the sea, French convict ships dump the offal of humanity on these shores. The Pilgrims came to America with religious convictions, somewhat different from the convictions criminal and otherwise those Frenchmen held who settled Canada, Caledonia and Cayenne. Climate here is one long season of sorrow. Guiana is an outlaw country, a jumping-off place of the world, a back-door to perdition; a dominion of dolour, despair, mud and blood, where Death is the jailer who frees. The cities of Cayenne and St. Laurent are cities of dreadful day and night where spread