The night was intensely dark, for the moon was but one day old, and had only barely revealed herself as a thin line of faint pearl in the evening sky for about half an hour before she followed the sun beneath the horizon, there was not a star to be seen in the whole of the visible firmament, and there was a feeling of hot, muggy dampness in the air that made me shrewdly suspect the presence overhead of a pall of rain- charged vapour, which would account for the opacity of the darkness which hemmed us in and pressed down upon us from above.
