Daylight arrived, noon came, and still there was no sign of the absentees, and in a fever of anxiety I made my way up to the fore-royal- yard, from which lofty elevation I made a careful survey of the inland district.  But there was very little to see beyond a two-mile stretch of a broad, winding river dotted with tree-grown islets here and there. The country itself was so densely overgrown with bush and trees that nothing upon its surface was to be seen.  As to the longboat, she was nowhere visible; but I was not much astonished at that, because, from the glimpse that I was able to catch of the river, I had very little doubt that its characteristics were precisely those of all the other rivers in that region, namely, a somewhat sluggish current of water thick with foul and fetid mud, swampy margins overgrown with mangroves, and numerous shallow, winding creeks, mangrove-bordered, discharging into it on either side; and it was highly probable that, failing to find a firm bank upon which to land along the margin of the river itself, the mutineers had proceeded in search of such a spot up one of the creeks. There were no canoes to be seen on that part of the river's surface which was visible from my look-out, and the only suggestion of human life anywhere in the neighbourhood was to be found in what I took to be a thin, almost invisible, wreath of smoke rising above the tree tops at a spot some two miles distant.  That wreath of smoke might, of course, indicate the position of the mutineers' bivouac; but, on the other hand, it might--and I thought this far more likely--indicate the location of a native village; and if the latter suspicion should prove to be correct I could not but feel that the situation of the mutineers was one full of peril.