A DAY IN THE DEEP WOODS. 143 
the Southern Sea was hidden by a veil of mist and 
fog. It was nearly dark, though perhaps not very 
late; but the cloud of mist aided approaching night, 
and I was apprehensive that exposure would result to 
our injury, especially as there was no roof to cover us 
and no material for making a fire. My implicit faith 
in the resources of my guide was not unrewarded, for 
we had descended but a short distance when he cried 
out, pointing to an immense rock as large as a church, 
just in sight farther down, “ You no see ajoupa?” 
It was, as I said, a huge rock, so delicately poised 
upon a spur from the main ridge that it seemed ready 
to fall. We seemed surrounded by an almost intermi- 
nable forest beneath, while above towered the twin 
mountain-peaks, bare and gray. As those near peaks 
were more than five thousand feet above the sea, we 
were now in a region cold and bleak, forty-eight hun- 
dred feet above the coast. Meyong had called this 
rock an ajoupa, and there must be, I knew, some 
reason for it, as he was one of those matter-of-fact 
persons who call a spade a spade. Just as we reached 
an angle of the rock he turned abruptly from the trail 
and dived beneath another rock into a hole about 
breast-high. Following him, I found myself in a 
spacious cavern hollowed out of the rock, with an 
entrance on the mountain-side just large enough to 
admit a man conveniently. 
The sudden transition from the howling of a tem- 
pest to comparative silence, from the fury of a pelting 
rain to the shelter of a roof, was bewildering, and I 
looked about me in wonder. While I stood in the 
semi-darkness that wrapped everything in gloom, the 
water dripping from my saturated garments, Meyong 
