e Sun should forget the poor Omaguas, and ripen their manioc and their
fruit no more.

Amyas had no wish to stay where he was longer than was absolutely
necessary to bring up the sick men from the Orinoco; but this, he well
knew, would be a journey probably of some months, and attended with much
danger.

Cary volunteered at once, however, to undertake the adventure, if
half-a-dozen men would join him, and the Indians would send a few young
men to help in working the canoe: but this latter item was not an easy
one to obtain; for the tribe with whom they now were, stood in some fear
of the fierce and brutal Guahibas, through whose country they must pass;
and every Indian tribe, as Amyas knew well enough, looks on each tribe
of different language to itself as natural enemies, hateful, and made
only to be destroyed wherever met. This strange fact, too, Amyas and his
party attributed to delusion of the devil, the divider and accuser; and
I am of opinion that they were perfectly right: only let Amyas take care
that while he is discovering the devil in the Indians, he does not give
place to him in himself, and that in more ways than one. But of that
more hereafter.

Whether, however, it was pride or shyness which kept the maiden aloof,
she conquered it after a while; perhaps through mere woman's curiosity;
and perhaps, too, from mere longing for amusement in a place so
unspeakably stupid as the forest. She gave the English to understand,
however, that though they all might be very important personages, none
of them was to be her companion but Amyas. And ere a month was past, she
was often hunting with him far and wide in the neighboring forest, with
a train of chosen nymphs, whom she had persuaded to follow her example
and spurn the dusky suitors around. This fashion, not uncommon, perhaps,
among the Indian tribes, where women are continually escaping to
the forest from the tyranny of the men, and often, perhaps, forming
temporary communities, was to the English a plain proof that they were
near the land of the famous Amazons, of whom they had heard so often
from the Indians; while Amyas had no doubt that, as a descendant of the
Incas, the maiden preserved the tradition of the Virgins of the Sun, and
of the austere monastic rule of the Peruvian superstition. Had not that
valiant German, George of Spires, and Jeronimo Ortal too, fifty years
before, found convents of the Sun upon these very upper waters?

So a harmless frien