222 WILD SPORTS IN THE SOUTH. 



their presence. If they wanted to leave, they knew of water con- 

 nections through to a score of other lakes, or they could flee away 

 to the south down the Kississimee Kiver, to the great Okechobee 

 Lake in the everglades. 



Some portion of the land around the fort was of the same 

 nature as that commonly known as everglade. Properly, the ever- 

 glades 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 

 farther 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 termination 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 dampness 

 has bred. Fallen truuks 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 pendent from the fingers. Strange birds fly over, 

 screeching in foreign tongues, and trees and reeds show by green 

 deposit on their sides the different heights to which the water that 

 floods the waste had arisen at different times. The rattlesnake and 

 the water-moccasin are abundant. 



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 inches. Through the 

 grass are seen winding channels made by the prevailing currents 

 and lagoons, from whose black muddy bottom grow the pond-lily 

 and floating grasses which intersect the prairie and turn back the 

 pedestrian. It would seem as if the rolling of the sea had built 

 an embankment of sand around all the coast, shutting in this 

 low-lying tract as does the cushion on a billiard-table, so that it 

 could be only drained by evaporation, or settling in the shallow 

 lakes and lagoons. 



Through this Stygian pool the haunted Indian doubled and 



