frighten the animals and betray us by barking to cruel men
who would slay us with poisoned arrows."

"O Rima, can you not understand? It is too far. And your grandfather,
poor old man, would die of weariness and hunger and old age in some
strange forest."

"Would he die--old grandfather? Then we could cover him up with palm
leaves in the forest and leave him. It would not be grandfather; only
his body that must turn to dust. He would be away--away where the stars
are. We should not die, but go on, and on, and on."

To continue the discussion seemed hopeless. I was silent, thinking of
what I had heard--that there were others like her somewhere in that vast
green world, so much of it imperfectly known, so many districts never
yet explored by white men. True, it was strange that no report of such a
race had reached the ears of any traveller; yet here was Rima herself at
my side, a living proof that such a race did exist. Nuflo probably knew
more than he would say; I had failed, as we have seen, to win the secret
from him by fair means, and could not have recourse to foul--the rack
and thumbscrew--to wring it from him. To the Indians she was only
an object of superstitious fear--a daughter of the Didi--and to them
nothing of her origin was known. And she, poor girl, had only a vague
remembrance of a few words heard in childhood from her mother, and
probably not rightly understood.

While these thoughts had been passing through my mind, Rima had been
standing silent by, waiting, perhaps, for an answer to her last words.
Then stooping, she picked up a small pebble and tossed it three or four
yards away.

"Do you see where it fell?" she cried, turning towards me. "That is on
the border of Guayana--is it not? Let us go there first."

"Rima, how you distress me! We cannot go there. It is all a savage
wilderness, almost unknown to men--a blank on the map--"

"The map?--speak no word that I do not understand."

In a very few words I explained my meaning; even fewer would have
sufficed, so quick was her apprehension.

"If it is a blank," she returned quickly, "then you know of nothing
to stop us--no river we cannot swim, and no great mountains like those
where Quito is."

"But I happen to know, Rima, for it has been related to me by old
Indians, that of all places that is the most difficult of access. There
is a river there, and although it is not on the map, it would prove
more impassable to us than the mighty Orinoco