gh to get some specimens that had never been
seen before, and I was returning to the coast. My engineer and I were
captured when ashore one night getting fuel for our furnace. They took
us into the forest a long way, binding our hands with the fiber of one
of the creepers, and I had no trouble whatever gathering that it was
their intention to make a feast of us--a sort of high tea, it was to be,
for they began brewing the herbs which I knew they used only when
they were cannibalizing. We were courteously permitted to watch these
preparations, for it was rightly assumed that they would be in some
degree interesting to us. We were, indeed, greatly interested in all
we saw, but much more so when, toward evening, a number of the natives
arrived on the scene carrying with them some of the stores which they
had found aboard the steam launch. They broke open with a stone hatchet
some tins of preserved meat, and seemed to enjoy the contents greatly.
The biscuits they didn't care for much, and the cakes of soap which
they began to eat could not honestly be said to be an entire success as
comestibles. But while we watched them at these _hors d'oeuvres_ to the
banquet at which we were expected to take a prominent part, a straggler
came up with some reserve supplies; I saw them; tins of dynamite--we
carried dynamite for blowing up the snags that obstructed the narrower
reaches of the river. We watched the thieves crowd around the bearer
of the tins, and we saw that the general impression that prevailed
in regard to them was that they had come upon some of the most highly
concentrated beef they had ever had in their hands. When they laid the
tins among the hot ashes of their fires and began to break them open
with their stone hatchets, my engineer thought with me that all the
interest there would be in the subsequent proceedings could not possibly
compensate us for the waste of precious time which would be entailed by
our remaining. We bolted in spite of our fettered hands, but before we
had got more than a couple of hundred yards from the camp, there took
place the severest earthquake, coincidental with a thunderstorm and the
salute of a battery of a thousand heavy guns. We were whirled into the
air like feathers in a breeze, but managed to cling--our bonds being
broken--to some of the boughs among which we found ourselves. Shortly
afterward, a quarter of an hour or so, there came on the heaviest shower
I had ever experienced. Such a