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arrows, or paint thorns, even set sharpened stakes for us to tread upon.”
    The posse slogged on all morning. The country was asphaltine swamp, into whose ooze the men’s tread sank to the ankles. What elevations there were rose only inches above the mire; vegetation was canebrake and deerwood, whose stalks, dense as the shafts in a quiver, could not be prized apart but must be hacked through with the bronze axe, while a canopy enforced a stoop upon even the runtiest. Beneath this vault the natives of the marsh glided with ease; they tracked us, so close you could hear their sparrowlike gibberish, while our party thrashed in mounting vexation. Men hung their footgear round their necks and slogged on, while leeches fastened to their crotches and armpits. The companies, at last breaking through to an eminence, rallied upon a shelf in the lee of a face, attempting to fire stalks of sodden pulp for warmth. Father wrapped a fleece about my shoulders and trundled to take counsel with the commanders.
    I leaned against the cliff, out of the rain. The morning’s labor had drained what little hope I yet held for this site. Of all the self-advertised Rivers of Hell, if in fact such a site was Selene’s object, who was to say this was the one to which she had made, or that Europa had believed so and followed—and what made us think that either of them was still here? Such were my ruminations, when a cry came from the men on the shelf.
    They were jigging and hooting, pointing to the rock at their feet. A trickle of flame meandered within the cracks. This was
naphtha.
Dragon’s blood, the men called it, though a child could see it was but some naturally occurring form of flammable liquid bitumen. The men called for Atticus and the officers. I scooted forward to hear.
    At the brink of a bluff a flammable trickle spooled netherward, self-extinguishing into a natural well five feet across and twenty in depth. Steps had been carved in the funnel, looking ancient as Cronos. At the base could be distinguished crude glyphs. A cleft led into the earth, such as a man might squeeze through sideways, and whose terminus, if there was one, could not be made out.
    Atticus, Father, and the captains worked forward through the press of men. The pilot Leon, whose spark had ignited the find, grinned up from halfway down the steps. He held a flint and horn charm, an
aestival
such as Selene had hung on our camphor tree the night before she made her break.
    â€œThis trash was looped at the brow of the bung, Cap’n. What d’you make of it?”
    Father recounted the charm’s significance. It was Damon, however, and four others chosen by lot (beans from a shaken helmet) who entered the crevice. The ingress was so close-fitting they could not scrape through in armor, but must shed all body plate save shields, rolled after them through the slot, and javelins to be used as spears, as the eight-footer was useless in such a strait, and the bow as well. Down they went. The remainder of the outfit clustered about the inlet, hallooing for reports as they descended. I begged Father and Atticus to let me accompany the party; my size would let me slither where grown men could not, and I could both speak the Amazon tongue and read its sign. Father would not hear of it. “Damon will reckon all you can and more. Find a seat and practice silence.”
    Here, then, is Damon’s account of this descent to the Underworld, as I many times heard him retell it, both in that hour and in subsequent seasons.
    Damon’s tale:
    I was picked because I had some of the Amazon lingo, and was well known to Selene, should we butt into her. Then too, if the lass Europa were indeed down this dungeon and repented her recklessness, it’d serve her to parley with me, her kin. I suffer the phobia of close spaces, but there was nothing for it. Wedge down we must.
    The party was five: two brothers called Ironhead and Colt, both peerless