Page:Dapples of the Circus (1943).pdf/209

 sandspit Freckles understood, but the great dark forest in front of him was filled with terrifying sounds which he did not understand.

He could see dimly that the trees were very large, so large in fact that he could not tell where one left off and another began. Their tops seemed to interlace like one great canopy. The undergrowth was also very thick, and one would have needed a hatchet to have penetrated very far in it. But the sounds from the unknown depths terrified him even more than its solemn vastness. Great bats as large as birds went zigzagging overhead. At first Freckles thought they were birds, but he finally decided they were bats. Strange birds screamed in the forest, and Freckles concluded these were parrots. The captain had told him the day before that the islands along shore were alive with parrots and cockatoos.

But the strangest of all the sounds was a continuous roaring of great volume and