Margaret was there, however, with her grating and her plate of armor. With her aid Seaton struggled free, and together they waded through the river and hurried to the line post which Margaret had set. Then, along the line established by the obelisk and the post, the man crashed into the thick growth of the jungle, the woman at his heels. Though the weirdly peculiar trees, creepers, and bamboolike shoots comprising the jungle's vegetation were not strong enough to bar the progress of the dense, hard, human bodies, yet they impeded that progress so terribly that the trail-breaker soon halted. "Not so good this way, Peg," he reflected. "These creepers will soon pull you down, I'm afraid; and, besides, we'll be losing our line pretty quickly. What to do? Better I knock out a path with this magic wand of mine, I guess--none of this stuff seems to be very heavy." Again they set out; Seaton's grating, so bent and battered now that it could not be recognized as once having been the door of a prison cell, methodically sweeping from side to side; a fiercely driven scythe against which no hyperthing could stand. Vines and creepers still wrapped around and clung to the struggling pair; shattered masses drifted down upon them from above, exuding in floods a viscous, gluey sap; and both masses of broken vegetation and floods of adhesive juices reënforced and rendered even more impassible the already high-piled wilderness of débris which had been accumulating there during time unthinkable. * * * * * Thus hampered, but driven to highest effort by the fear of imminent darkness and consequent helplessness, they struggled indomitably on. On and on; while behind them stretched an ever-lengthening, straight, sharply cut streak of blackness in the livid hyperlight of the jungle. Seaton's great mass and prodigious strength enabled him to force his way through that fantastically inimical undergrowth without undue difficulty, but the unremitting pull and drag of the attacking vines eventually wore down the woman's much slighter physique. "Just a minute, Dick!" She stopped, strength almost spent. "I hate to admit that I can't stand the pace, especially since you are doing all the real work, as well as wading through the same mess that I am, but I don't believe that I can go on much longer without a rest." "All right--" Seaton began, but broke off, staring ahead. "No; keep on coming one minute more, Peg--three more jumps and we're through." "I can go that much farther, of course. Lead on, MacDuff!" and they struggled on.