314 WILD 8POKT8 IN THE SOUTH. 



River, to the great Okechobee Lake in the ever- 

 glades. 



Some portion of the land around the fort was of the 

 same nature as that commonly known as everglade. 

 Properly, the everglades are confined to that portion of 

 the peninsula lying between the uttermost southerly 

 point, Cape Sable and Okechobee Lake, a space of about 

 two degrees of latitude, though some are found further 

 northward. 



No language save that of the painter's brush can 

 depict the desolate immensity of one of these treeless 

 swamps. There league after league of rank grass waves 

 on every side, unrelieved by hope, to the explorer, of ter- 

 mination or prospect of change. Here and there a thick 

 leafed cactus, or cabbage-palmetto, or a clump of leafless 

 cypress, grows upward, draped in the moss the stagnant 

 water has bred. Fallen trunks of old trees are tangled 

 with palmetto roots beneath the grass, having drifted in 

 the summer rains from the place where they grew, or 

 gaunt dead water-oaks hold out their arms, from which 

 the flesh of leaves has dropped away, or still clings pen- 

 dent from the fingers. Strange birds fly over, screeching 

 in foreign tongues, and trees and stumps and grass show 

 by green deposit on their sides the different heights to 

 which the water that floods the waste had arisen on dif- 

 ferent months. 



In the dry season this broad extent of country is nearly 

 dry. During the rainy season of spring and summer the 

 water lies over it in varying depths from two to twenty 



