Next morning, the 25th, the canoes were brought down.  A path was chopped for them and rollers laid; and half-way down the rapids Lyra and Kermit, who were overseeing the work as well as doing their share of the pushing and hauling, got them into a canal of smooth water, which saved much severe labor.  As our food supply lowered we were constantly more desirous of economizing the strength of the men.  One day more would complete a month since we had embarked on the Duvida as we had started in February, the lunar and calendar months coincided.  We had used up over half our provisions.  We had come only a trifle over 160 kilometres, thanks to the character and number of the rapids.  We believed we had three or four times the distance yet to go before coming to a part of the river where we might hope to meet assistance, either from rubber-gatherers, or from Pyrineus, if he were really coming up the river which we were going down.  If the rapids continued to be as they had been it could not be much more than three weeks before we were in straits for food, aside from the ever-present danger of accident in the rapids; and if our progress were no faster than it had been—­and we were straining to do our best—­we would in such event still have several hundreds of kilometres of unknown river before us.  We could not even hazard a guess at what was in front.  The river was now a really big river, and it seemed impossible that it could flow either into the Gy-Parana or the Tapajos.  It was possible that it went into the Canuma, a big affluent of the Madeira low down, and next to the Tapajos.  It was more probable that it was the headwaters of the Aripuanan, a river which, as I have said, was not even named on the excellent English map of Brazil I carried.  Nothing but the mouth had been known to any geographer; but the lower course had long been known to rubber-gatherers, and recently a commission from the government of Amazonas had partway ascended one branch of it—­not as far as the rubber-gatherers had gone, and, as it turned out, not the branch we came down.

Two of our men were down with fever.  Another man, Julio, a fellow of powerful frame, was utterly worthless, being an inborn, lazy shirk with the heart of a ferocious cur in the body of a bullock.  The others were good men, some of them very good indeed.  They were under the immediate supervision of Pedrinho Craveiro, who was first-class in every way.

This camp was very lovely.  It was on the edge of a bay, into which the river broadened immediately below the rapids.  There was a beach of white sand, where we bathed and washed our clothes.  All around us, and across the bay, and on both sides of the long water-street made by the river, rose the splendid forest.  There were flocks of parakeets colored green, blue, and red.  Big toucans called overhead, lustrous green-black in color, with white throats, red gorgets, red-and-yellow tail coverts, and huge black-and-yellow bills.  Here the soil