it would have been a mere hazard had I seen any big animal.  Generally the woods were silent and empty.  Now and then little troops of birds of many kinds passed—­wood-hewers, ant-thrushes, tanagers, flycatchers; as in the spring and fall similar troops of warblers, chickadees, and nuthatches pass through our northern woods.  On the rocks and on the great trees by the river grew beautiful white and lilac orchids, the sobralia, of sweet and delicate fragrance.  For the moment my own books seemed a trifle heavy, and perhaps I would have found the day tedious if Kermit had not lent me the Oxford Book of French Verse.  Eustache Deschamp, Joachim du Bellay, Ronsard, the delightful La Fontaine, the delightful but appalling Villon, Victor Hugo’s “Guitare,” Madame Desbordes-Valmore’s lines on the little girl and her pillow, as dear little verses about a child as ever were written—­these and many others comforted me much, as I read them in head-net and gauntlets, sitting on a log by an unknown river in the Amazonian forest.

On the 10th we again embarked and made a kilometre and a half, spending most of the time in getting past two more rapids.  Near the first of these we saw a small cayman, a jacare-tinga.  At each set of rapids the canoes were unloaded and the loads borne past on the shoulders of the camaradas; three of the canoes were paddled down by a couple of naked paddlers apiece; and the two sets of double canoes were let down by ropes, one of one couple being swamped but rescued and brought safely to shore on each occasion.  One of the men was upset while working in the swift water, and his face was cut against the stones.  Lyra and Kermit did the actual work with the camaradas.  Kermit, dressed substantially like the camaradas themselves, worked in the water, and, as the overhanging branches were thronged with crowds of biting and stinging ants, he was marked and blistered over his whole body.  Indeed, we all suffered more or less from these ants; while the swarms of biting flies grew constantly more numerous.  The termites ate holes in my helmet and also in the cover of my cot.  Every one else had a hammock.  At this camp we had come down the river about 102 kilometres, according to the surveying records, and in height had descended nearly 100 metres, as shown by the aneroid—­although the figure in this case is only an approximation, as an aneroid cannot be depended on for absolute accuracy of results.

Next morning we found that during the night we had met with a serious misfortune.  We had halted at the foot of the rapids.  The canoes were moored to trees on the bank, at the tail of the broken water.  The two old canoes, although one of them was our biggest cargo-carrier, were water-logged and heavy, and one of them was leaking.  In the night the river rose.  The leaky canoe, which at best was too low in the water, must have gradually filled from the wash of the waves.  It sank, dragging down the other; they began to roll, bursting their moorings; and in the morning they had disappeared.  A canoe was launched to look for them; but, rolling over the boulders on the rocky bottom, they had at once been riven asunder, and the big fragments that were soon found, floating in eddies, or along the shore, showed that it was useless to look farther.  We called these rapids Broken Canoe Rapids.