The jungle heat was oppressive, the noise broken only
 
by our own careful progress, the squawk of startled birds, or the
 
chatter of occasional beady-eyed and elusive monkeys. Soon we
 
were in swamp, with water up to our knees and in sharp-edged
 
coogan grass that grew over our heads. We had to hack our way
 
every step.
 
     At night we finally found a place to camp -- here the
 
water was only ankle deep. By cutting off  boughs from trees we
 
managed to build crude structures that would keep our blankets
 
above water. When we turned in all of us were near the point of
 
exhaustion, and all of us slept the sleep of the dead. As a re-
 
sult, none of us aroused when the water rose during the night, and
 
we awoke to find ourselves half-floating in our beds.
 
      On the second morning McCoy awoke with a feeling of illness.
 
 It was a considerable task for him to summon enough strength
 
during the day to keep himself from falling out--he said that, if
 
this happened, he would expect the rest of us to go on. Somehow,
 
he managed to keep going. And we were all glad we had not had to
 
stop; for at about 8:00 p.m., we heard the sound of rifle and
 
machine-gun fire at a distance of about two or three kilometers,
 
 in the direction from which we had just come. And, the next;
 
morning, McCoy's indisposition had cleared away without leaving
 
him in the throes of dysentery or malaria, as we had feared.
 
     As an example of the hard going of the Philippine
 
jungle, at the end of the fourth day we had not progressed more
 
 
                                                    -83-