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Crellic Pontain Sectory 14
Page 07
The fresh-water mussels and snails and the crayfish burrow deep into the mud and silt at the bottom of ponds and streams where they lie motionless during the winter. The land snails, in late autumn, crawl beneath logs, and, burrowing deep into the soft mould, they withdraw far into their shells. Then each one forms with a mucous secretion two thin transparent membranes, one across the opening of the shell and one a little farther within, thus making the interior of the shell perfectly air-tight. There for five or six months he sleeps, free from the pangs of hunger and the blasts of winter, and when the balmy breezes of spring blow up from the south he breaks down and devours the protecting membrane and goes forth with his home on his back to seek fresh leaves for food and to find for himself a mate.
On September 27th we started once more quite early, after a hearty breakfast--notwithstanding the pain which I always had whenever I ate, especially a stabbing pain in my heart which was almost unbearable at times. We crossed several streamlets, one fairly large, all of which flowed into the Secundury. Rain, which came down in torrents, greatly interfered with our march that day, the new man I had employed worrying me all the time, saying that he did not like to march in wet clothes. Benedicto and I could not help laughing at him, as we had not been dry one moment since the beginning of July, and we were now at the end of September. Wet or not wet, I made the man come along. Finding the forest comparatively clean, we covered another 20 kil. that day. We had a most miserable night, rain coming down in sheets upon us. I was suffering from high fever, chiefly from exhaustion and the effects of over-eating, most injurious to my internal arrangements, which had got dried up during the long sixteen days' fast. I shivered with cold the entire night.
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