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ho!” Then you add something about the port bow.
    I wished that I had my binoculars, but I’ve no head for heights and it didn’t seem to be a good idea to go fetch them. I waited for Ogburn to wave Thayer down and commandeer them himself, and then I joined him on the roof of the wheelhouse, from which we both craned our necks to get a glimpse of the promised land.
    For a while, I thought that Thayer’s optimism had over-reached itself. Because of the weed the surface of the sea was mostly green with lacunae of gray and brown—from above it might have looked much like marshy land—and it wasn’t easy to spot a change of color or texture in the line of the horizon. But it was there all right—eventually I could pick out the silvery foam of waves breaking on rocks, and then the lighter green of foliage extending beyond.
    Nieland came up on deck, and promptly got out his sextant. I was glad to be able to laugh. Even Ogburn came to life a little more than usual as he began handing out orders in some profusion. Nieland proved that he wasn’t just wasting his time by demonstrating that we were very close to the mouth of a major river, which ought to prove navigable for quite some distance as it wound inland through the forest. Ogburn agreed to make for the river, and we found our way into its estuary late that afternoon. We proceeded slowly, with a man taking soundings every yard of the way, but the bottom was a long way down and the river was wide.
    There were mud banks on the north bank, caused not by tidal effects (Attica’s moon was only a fifth the size of Earth’s) but by the fact that the river’s dimensions varied according to season. The rainy season was well behind us for this year, and the river had shrunk somewhat. We didn’t go far upriver—hardly a mile—before we anchored. We lowered the larger of the ship’s boats, and held an informal debate as to who would join the party which—at the cost of muddy boots—would be the first human beings (so far as we knew) to set foot on the new continent. There were ten of us in all—the four passengers, Malpighi and five of the crew. We let Nieland step out first. After all, it was his ship.
    The day was warm, but hardly tropical. Nevertheless, the forest beyond the mudbar did have a suggestion of jungle about it. It was extremely wet, because the ground had a tendency to bogginess, and the branches of the trees were festooned with creepers. There was a preponderance of long, spatulate leaves and languorous drapes. The tree trunks were gnarled—quite a lot were hairy or scaled like fir cones. There was a smell of staleness. There were a great many small birds moving along the branches and I saw several green snakes coiling round the stems of the creepers. Midges clustered in vaporous clouds around the shallow pools of brackish water, and the mud seemed to be alive—though much of the movement was caused by tiny bubbles of marsh gas rising to the surface rather than by the small invertebrates and amphibians which inhabited it.
    I shook the branches of a particularly wizened tree, and inspected the shower of insects that inevitably resulted with some enthusiasm. Two of the crewmen, standing nearby, left me in no doubt as to their opinion of this eccentric behavior.
    I found a lizard with spade-like suckered feet clinging to the bark of a tree pretending to be an excrescence of its trunk, and plucked it off. It wriggled furiously, and let its long black tongue loll out of its mouth. It was toothless, but the upper palate was ridged with rough bone contours that would be quite adequate for crushing the insects on which it fed. I let it go.
    There was a constant chatter which—though most of it was made by the birds and other flying creatures—could by no means be described as “song.” It was all clicks and rattles, clucks and croaks, with only the occasional half-strangled whistle.
    The distribution of the trees was highly irregular—they tended to grow in