We anchored the boat and waded ashore, the clean water reaching our arm-pits. In this manner we reached the fever-hole of Jamaica; the home of every insect pest the West Indies can produce, the place in which the Jamaican alligator still lives and moves and has its being. Not a pleasant spot either to linger in or look upon, just evil swamp-land, with the evil stench of damp vegetation and rotting wood. You step from the sand of the seashore into brittle stubble, through which the water surges as you pass. You squelch to the river-bank over rotting weed, ankle-deep in slime, half smothered by a cloud of gnats, and mosquitoes, and buzzing flies. It is the Jamaica Avernus--the white man’s grave. The Rio Cobra River at its mouth is emptied by a dozen twisting streams, just as the trunk of a cotton tree is supported by many twisted roots. Sometimes these twisted streams join together, sometimes they flow apart; so if progress is to be made inland, much wading must be done. It is in these little streams that alligators love to lie, so you must walk warily, with your rifle ready. We waded many streams, and trudged ankle-deep through long stretches of oily slime; we stumbled over logs half hidden, and our stretched hands disturbed the nests of scores of creeping things. The black guide, a famous sportsman of the swamp land, grinned his joy at being really chief, the indisputable and indispensable head of a party of white men. He forgot to tincture his commands with respect, and though clad in nothing save a decayed merino undershirt, looked and played the man. “De beast there,” pointing a joyful finger to a heap of filth, green and brown. Rifles were raised, and the explosions of three Winchesters reverberated round those sickening pools. The green mass surged heavily, and a streak of dark water showing in the centre of the thick slime marked the place where the alligator had dived. “Him gone; never see him more,” said our happy chieftain, and we trudged through more slime, waded across more streams, some deep as our waist-belts, others with water only ankle high. Once the youngest of us stealthily massacred a floating tree stump, mistaking a twisted root for an opened jaw, and then dropped to the rear under the glance of a contemptuous native. “You want him log for rifle butt?” The youthful sportsman attempted no defence. Again we fired, this time at a sleepy family of two--a father and a son. The son was hit, but the father had twisted and dived with the speed of a springing snake. We could not reach the wounded one, which, lashing his tail and snapping his jaws in the death agony, rolled into the river to die. We paused to drink tepid water drawn from a scorched barrel, and talked and listened to stories of mighty bags; of beasts thirty feet long, shot after fearful battles, of mauled natives, and of all the dangers of the sport. Our thoughts and words were all of slaughter.