It was often impossible to judge whether fairly solid soil or oozy murk lay before them.

Often they went down to their waists.

Sometimes the children fell and were dragged up again by the stronger.

Now and then rattle snakes coiled and hissed, and the women killed them with sticks.

Other serpents slipped away in the slime.
Everybody was plastered with mud, and they became mere images of human beings.
In the afternoon they reached a sort of oasis in the terrible swamp, and there they buried two more of their number who had perished from exhaustion.