essentials the same. His father had served all through the Civil War,
entering an Iowa cavalry regiment as a private and coming out as a
captain; his breast-bone was shattered by a blow from a musket-butt,
in hand-to-hand fighting at Shiloh.

During this portage the weather favored us. We were coming toward the
close of the rainy season. On the last day of the month, when we moved
camp to the foot of the gorge, there was a thunder-storm; but on the
whole we were not bothered by rain until the last night, when it
rained heavily, driving under the fly so as to wet my cot and bedding.
However, I slept comfortably enough, rolled in the damp blanket.
Without the blanket I should have been uncomfortable; a blanket is a
necessity for health. On the third day Lyra and Kermit, with their
daring and hard-working watermen, after wearing labor, succeeded in
getting five canoes through the worst of the rapids to the chief fall.
The sixth, which was frail and weak, had its bottom beaten out on the
jagged rocks of the broken water. On this night, although I thought I
had put my clothes out of reach, both the termites and the
carregadores ants got at them, ate holes in one boot, ate one leg of
my drawers, and riddled my handkerchief; and I now had nothing to
replace anything that was destroyed.

Next day Lyra, Kermit, and their camaradas brought the five canoes
that were left down to camp. They had in four days accomplished a work
of incredible labor and of the utmost importance; for at the first
glance it had seemed an absolute impossibility to avoid abandoning the
canoes when we found that the river sank into a cataract broken
torrent at the bottom of a canyon-like gorge between steep mountains.
On April 2 we once more started, wondering how soon we should strike
other rapids in the mountains ahead, and whether in any reasonable
time we should, as the aneroid indicated, be so low down that we
should necessarily be in a plain where we could make a journey of at
least a few days without rapids. We had been exactly a month going
through an uninterrupted succession of rapids. During that month we
had come only about 110 kilometres, and had descended nearly 150
metres--the figures are approximate but fairly accurate. We had lost
four of the canoes with which we started, and one other, which we had
built, and the life of one man; and the life of a dog which by its
death had in all probability saved the life of Colonel Rondon. In a
stra