The Saint in Miami

to realise that he was facing a motionless barrier of sawgrass with heavy stalks alight with clinging beads of dew.

'Plenty grass,' said Charlie Halwuk. 'But bottom got some sand right here. Drive on.'

For an interminable hour the Saint clung to the levers with sweating hands as the marsh buggy ploughed on through. The parted grass gave off smoky clouds of midges and mos­quitoes. They filled the air with a vicious droning hum that was audible above the rattle of the engine, beat against the headlights like a living storm, and massed into savage on­slaught against every inch of exposed human flesh. The intermittent glugs of Hoppy's bottle alternated with stinging slaps of his palm. Gallipolis fanned himself and cursed in­terestingly in his mother tongue. Simon, with both hands occu­pied, finally stopped and tied his handkerchief round the lower part of his face for a modicum of protection, and took off his coat and draped it over his head like a bonnet in an at­tempt to save his neck and ears. Only the Seminole, at home in the lands of his ancestors, seemed completely untroubled. He sat almost somnolently beside the Saint, directing their passage with occasional grunts and touches on Simon's arm.

The sawgrass ended as suddenly as though some celestial gardener had taken a stroke with a stupendous scythe. Ahead was a clear wide space of flat metallic blackness. The mist hung above it in lowering clouds, letting the headlights sweep out to light a forest of death.

White with age, hoary with moss, and stark as the blasted timberlands of Hades might have been, the great gnarled cy­presses loomed on the far side of the clearing, their upper branches lost in the low ceiling of fog.

'Plenty slow,' said Charlie Halwuk. 'Go on.'

Simon went into bottom gear, and the great wheels settled down. It seemed as if the ground beneath them melted away, turning into a sheet of slaty liquid, foul and oleaginous, that threatened to rise and engulf them and suck them down. They sank into it relentlessly until it swirled sluggishly above the hubs of the wheels.

'Chees!' said Hoppy Uniatz, and was quiet after that.

Simon could have reached out beside him and touched the enveloping wetness with his hand. Slashing like some antedi­luvian swimmer, the marsh buggy went on.

Wings flashed startlingly ahead, beating branches; and the night was wild with hoarse cries as a hidden colony of egrets took to flight and crashed blindly heavenward before the ap­proach of the terrifying intruder in their preserves. The am­phibian wallowed on into the blanched grey forest, and the world of reality was gone.

A rudder at the stem of the hybrid craft, geared in with the dual clutch mechanism, took hold and lent its help to the steering, and the Saint had already developed a fair amount of assurance in the handling of his charge; but now there were new problems in the threading of a path through the trees. His piloting was an outstanding blend of inspiration and desperation. He judged each opening to a nicety, driving through gaps where there were only inches to spare; and yet as if they were caught in some gargantuan bagatelle table each opening, instead of bringing them to a clear passage, only brought them face to face with another tree.

Twice he turned hopelessly to the phlegmatic Indian to have his unspoken question met by Charlie Halwuk's flat 'Drive on.'

Shining eyes came redly towards them, moved together into a single stop light, and vanished as a twenty- foot alliga­tor sank below the surface like a waterlogged tree.

The wheels began to churn on a different note, and Simon realised that they were not making any progress.

'We're stuck,' he said as though he were afraid some un­seen listener might hear.

'Log,' said Charlie Halwuk. 'Plenty back. Then go on.'

The Saint reversed. The ten-foot flanged wheels at last took hold and dragged them backwards. He found another opening and coddled the marsh buggy through it, and sighed wearily at the sight of more grass ahead. He pointed without speaking.

The Indian said: 'Plenty more grass now. Then swamp again. Then hammock. You keep a little more left.'

Black mud boiled up under the landboat even as he spoke. The Saint fed more gas. Dripping water, the machine began to climb with a changing cadence, shaking itself like a me­chanical bear. Beyond, the grass looked as if it stretched end­lessly. Simon felt stifled and had to pull off his masking hand­kerchief in spite of the mosquitoes, searching for a draught of breathable air.

Life became a game of pressing down sawgrass and won­dering how many times Charlie Halwuk would say 'Drive on.' Without warning they were in a swamp again. They got out of it. Then still more grass; and, suddenly, trees. They plunged into trackless jungle-a nightmare of dogging mat­ted vines, falling logs, and pliant unbreakable trailers that seeped down from above to claw at their faces with inch-long thorns. At no time was there anything like a trail, or anything to point a direction; he sometimes wondered if he was driv­ing round in circles, destined eventually to find himself back where he had been two hours before. But the Seminole never seemed to know any uncertainty, and kept warning him to veer left and right with as much wooden confidence as if he had been watching a compass.

Then at last, as though he were emerging from the dream­land of a dispersing anaesthetic, Simon began to realise that he could see around him, that the shining green under the headlights was fading, and above and about them the black­ness was turning to a dull grey. Then, far above, the matted branches were touched with a thin blush of fire.

'Look,' said the Saint.

Beside him, Charlie Halwuk said: 'Day.'

The marsh buggy pushed on into the blistering dawn.

VII How Simon Templar Found a New Recipe for Roast Pork, and Hoppy Could No Longer Control His Toist

Heat came with the morning-a sticky oppressive heat that stewed itself softeningly into every bone and cartilage. The Saint had known jungles and deserts, but he had never felt himself overwhelmed with such torrid enervation. The mists fled before the sun, leaving the swampland a visible vastness of tangled draperies that seemed to have neither beginning nor end; but over the riotously intertwining foliage the hu­midity still weighed down like an invisible blanket. His arms ached with the strain of fighting the twin clutch levers, and his whole body felt as if it had been left overnight in a Finn­ish bath.

'How much further, Charlie?'

Simon found that his voice also had sunk into a lower key. He used his sleeve to wipe perspiration from the clutch han­dles.

The Indian pointed away from where the climbing sun was slanting into their eyes and said: 'Over there. Maybe ten miles. Maybe fifteen. Maybe more. Dunno.'

'For Christ's sake,' Simon swore. 'I thought it was only ten miles when we left the road. Now it's maybe more. What am I doing-driving this goddam tank backwards?'

'Plenty hard,' said the Indian impassively. 'No can go straight. Plenty long way round.'

'We should have gone back to Miami and bought an aero­plane,' said the Saint dispiritedly.

'If you wanted to land anywhere in this country,' said Gal­lipolis, 'you'd have to get out with a parachute.'

It was only too plain, as Simon stared at the landscape ahead, that the Greek was not exaggerating. Simon took time off to light another cigarette, and admitted it. There was nothing else to do but what they were doing.

Charlie Halwuk said: 'Can go back.'

Simon caught the glint in the Seminole's flat black eyes and twisted his lips back to the reckless smile that so seldom left them.

'I'm hungry and sleepy and the mosquitoes have taken enough blood out of me for a transfusion, and I've tooled this cockeyed charabanc around all night through stuff that I didn't think anything on wheels would go through,' he drawled. 'After that, what's another day more or less? I al­ways wanted to see these Everglades, anyway. Let's have some breakfast, and I'll drive on.'

They built a small fire to boil water to make coffee, since that was the only way to disguise the colour of the swamp water and at the same time reduce its probable bacterial con­tent. They ate corned beef and canned beans cold-or as cold as the outside temperature allowed them to be, which was really lukewarm. And the Saint drove on.