encfs fails to decrypt one of two sources

I am regularly backing up remote, incremental, encrypted copies of my home dir as well as /etc. The encryption portion is done simply using "encfs --reverse"

In both cases I can see what seem to be properly encrypted files copied away.

But I get weird results when I mount the remote, encrypted directories on /mnt/sshfs and run:

ENCFS6_CONFIG=/home/macho/.encfs6.xml encfs /mnt/sshfs /mnt/crypt

For my home directory this works expected, and I can see all my decrypted files.

But for the remote copy of encrypted /etc, although the command happily reports no errors, yet the mount is empty:

# sshfs <remote source redacted>:/media/backup/encfs/basic/etc/2017-10-14_12:37:828918549 /mnt/sshfs
# ENCFS6_CONFIG=/home/macho/.encfs6.xml encfs /mnt/sshfs /mnt/crypt
EncFS Password:
# ls /mnt/crypt -a
. ..
# mount | grep crypt
encfs on /mnt/crypt type fuse.encfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions)

Any thoughts on why this would be broken? Is it a problem with encfs itself? I used the same password for both. The discrepancy between root and user macho's versions of .encfs6.xml shouldn't be the problem: the root user doesn't even have such a file. Should I not be using the same xml file for more than one source? That would seem strange.

Thanks!