Elliot would have agreed with Stanley’s description from a century before: “Overhead the wide-spreading branches absolutely shut out the daylight.… We marched in a feeble twilight.… The dew dropped and pattered on us incessantly.… Our clothes were heavily saturated with it.… Perspiration exuded from every pore, for the atmosphere was stifling.… What a forbidding aspect had the Dark Unknown which confronted us!”
