village will find you. It is bewitched,
master. But you will soon see the path through the _matto_."

"Can't you stay by me until time to land? I don't like the looks of
these alligators."

"It is better for a white man to face an alligator than for a _caboclo_
to face an Ungapuk. Once they used to kill and eat us for our strength.
Now--" Again his shrug was eloquent.

"Now?" Hale prompted impatiently.

"The white god who put a spell on these one-time cannibals will bewitch
us and make us wash and rejoice when it is time to die."

* * * * *

He shuddered and spat at a cayman that was lumbering away from his
_bataloe._

Hale Oakham laughed, a hearty boyish laugh for a rather learned young
professor.

"Is that all they do to you?" he asked.

"No. All who enter this magic _matto_ die soon, rejoicing. Before the
last breath comes, it is said their bodies turn into a handful of silver
dust--poof!--like that." He snapped his dirty fingers. "Then the life
that leaves them goes into rocks that walk."

Hale sighed resignedly. There wasn't any use to argue.

"Unload your _bataloe_," he ordered testily, "and get your filthy
carcasses away."

The half-breeds obeyed readily. As the departing _bataloe_ turned from
the _igarape_ into the open water of the river, the young man repressed
a sudden lifting of his scalp. He was in for it now!

His long body sprawled out in the _bataloe_, he paddled about aimlessly
for several minutes until he found an aisle through the jungle--the path
that led to the jungle village which he was visiting in the name of
science, and for a certain award.

Before plunging into that waiting tangle where life and death carried on
a visible, unceasing struggle, he hesitated. Instinctively he shrank
from losing himself in that mad green world.

* * * * *

He had first heard of the Ungapuks at the convention of the Nescience
Club in New York, that body of scientists, near-scientists and
adventurers linked together for the purpose of awarding the yearly
Woolman prizes for the most spectacular addition of empiric facts to
various branches of science. One of the members of the club, an
explorer, had told a wild yarn about a tribe of Brazilian Indians,
headed by Sir Basil Addington, an English scientist, who was conducting
secret experiments in biochemistry in his jungle laboratory. The
explorer had said that the scientist, half-crazed