Elsie had slept long and soundly: she found herself in a new world of sunshine and calm. When she looked over the side to examine the crudely fashioned canoe, she was astonished by the limpid purity of the water. She could see white pebbles and vegetation at a vast depth. It seemed to be impossible that a few hours should have worked such a change, but Suarez assured her that the streams which tumbled down the precipitous gorges of the hills ran clear quickly after rain, owing to the sifting of the surface drainage by the phenomenal tree-growth. “Wherever timber can lodge on the hillsides,” he told her, “fallen trunks lie in layers of fifteen or twenty feet. They rot there, and young saplings push their way through to the light and air, while creepers bind them in an impenetrable mass; in many places small trees and shrubs of dense foliage take root amidst the decaying stumps beneath, so that even the Indians cannot pass from one point to another, but are compelled to climb the rocky watercourses or follow the slopes of glaciers. When you see what appears to be a smooth green space above the lower brown-colored belt of copper beech, that is not a moss-covered stretch of open land, but the closely packed tops of young trees, where a new tract has been bared by an avalanche.” She was in no mood this morning to assimilate the marvels of Hanover Island. Her brain had been cleared, restored to the normal, by refreshing sleep. With a more active perception of the curious difficulties which beset the _Kansas_ came a feeling akin to despair. The brightness of nature served rather to convert the ship into a prison. Storm and stress, whether of the elements or of the less candid foes who lurked unseen on the neighboring shores, made the _Kansas_ a veritable fortress, a steel refuge seemingly impregnable. But the knowledge of the vessel’s helplessness, and of the equally desperate hazard which beset her inmates, was rendered only more poignant by the smiling aspect of land and sea. Elsie was not a philosopher. She was just a healthy, clean-minded Englishwoman, imbued with a love of art for art’s sake, a girl whose wholesome, courageous temperament probably unfitted her to achieve distinction in the artistic career which she had mapped out for herself. So the super-Alpine glories surrounding that inland sea, and the prismatic hues flashing from many a glacier and rainbow of cataract mist, left her unmoved, solely because the rough-hewn Indian craft bobbing by the side of the great ship called to mind the extraordinary conditions under which she and all on board existed.