ught it along the wooded banks of the Orinoco, and beyond the roaring
foam-world of Maypures, and on the upper waters of the mighty Amazon.
They had gone up the streams even into Peru itself, and had trodden the
cinchona groves of Loxa, ignorant, as all the world was then, of their
healing virtues. They had seen the virgin snows of Chimborazo towering
white above the thundercloud, and the giant cone of Cotopaxi blackening
in its sullen wrath, before the fiery streams rolled down its sides.
Foiled in their search at the back of the Andes, they had turned
eastward once more, and plunged from the alpine cliffs into "the green
and misty ocean of the Montana." Slowly and painfully they had worked
their way northward again, along the eastern foot of the inland
Cordillera, and now they were bivouacking, as it seems, upon one of the
many feeders of the Meta, which flow down from the Suma Paz into the
forest-covered plains. There they sat, their watch-fires glittering
on the stream, beneath the shadow of enormous trees, Amyas and Cary,
Brimblecombe, Yeo, and the Indian lad, who has followed them in all
their wanderings, alive and well: but as far as ever from Manoa, and
its fairy lake, and golden palaces, and all the wonders of the Indian's
tale. Again and again in their wanderings they had heard faint rumors of
its existence, and started off in some fresh direction, to meet only a
fresh disappointment, and hope deferred, which maketh sick the heart.

There they sit at last--four-and-forty men out of the eighty-four who
left the tree of Guayra:--where are the rest?

"Their bones are scatter'd far and wide,
By mount, by stream, and sea."

Drew, the master, lies on the banks of the Rio Negro, and five brave
fellows by him, slain in fight by the poisoned arrows of the Indians, in
a vain attempt to penetrate the mountain-gorges of the Parima. Two more
lie amid the valleys of the Andes, frozen to death by the fierce slaty
hail which sweeps down from the condor's eyrie; four more were drowned
at one of the rapids of the Orinoco; five or six more wounded men are
left behind at another rapid among friendly Indians, to be recovered
when they can be: perhaps never. Fever, snakes, jaguars, alligators,
cannibal fish, electric eels, have thinned their ranks month by month,
and of their march through the primeval wilderness no track remains,
except those lonely graves.

And there the survivors sit, beside the silent stream, benea