ractically no hardship at all for
travellers and visitors. This is a healthy plateau. But, of course,
the men who do the first pioneering, even in country like this,
encounter dangers and run risks; and they make payment with their
bodies. At more than one halting-place we had come across the forlorn
grave of some soldier or laborer of the commission. The grave-mound
lay within a rude stockade; and an uninscribed wooden cross, gray and
weather-beaten, marked the last resting-place of the unknown and
forgotten man beneath, the man who had paid with his humble life the
cost of pushing the frontier of civilization into the wild savagery of
the wilderness. Farther west the conditions become less healthy. At
this station Colonel Rondon received news of sickness and of some
deaths among the employees of the commission in the country to the
westward, which we were soon to enter. Beriberi and malignant malarial
fever were the diseases which claimed the major number of the victims.

Surely these are "the men who do the work for which they draw the
wage." Kermit had with him the same copy of Kipling's poems which he
had carried through Africa. At these falls there was one sunset of
angry splendor; and we contrasted this going down of the sun, through
broken rain-clouds and over leagues of wet tropical forest, with the
desert sunsets we had seen in Arizona and Sonora, and along the Guaso
Nyiro north and west of Mount Kenia, when the barren mountains were
changed into flaming "ramparts of slaughter and peril" standing above
"the wine-dark flats below."

It rained during most of the day after our arrival at Utiarity.
Whenever there was any let-up the men promptly came forth from their
houses and played head-ball with the utmost vigor; and we would listen
to their shrill undulating cries of applause and triumph until we also
grew interested and strolled over to look on. They are more infatuated
with the game than an American boy is with baseball or football. It is
an extraordinary thing that this strange and exciting game should be
played by, and only by, one little tribe of Indians in what is almost
the very centre of South America. If any traveller or ethnologist
knows of a tribe elsewhere that plays a similar game, I wish he would
let me know. To play it demands great activity, vigor, skill, and
endurance. Looking at the strong, supple bodies of the players, and at
the number of children roundabout, it seemed as if the tribe must