e has never
been even guessed, bears no resemblance whatever to following even a
fairly dangerous river which has been thoroughly explored and has
become in some sort a highway, so that experienced pilots can be
secured as guides, while the portages have been pioneered and trails
chopped out, and every dangerous feature of the rapids is known
beforehand. In this case no one could foretell that the river would
cleave its way through steep mountain chains, cutting narrow clefts in
which the cliff walls rose almost sheer on either hand. When a rushing
river thus "canyons," as we used to say out West, and the mountains
are very steep, it becomes almost impossible to bring the canoes down
the river itself and utterly impossible to portage them along the
cliff sides, while even to bring the loads over the mountain is a task
of extraordinary labor and difficulty. Moreover, no one can tell how
many times the task will have to be repeated, or when it will end, or
whether the food will hold out; every hour of work in the rapids is
fraught with the possibility of the gravest disaster, and yet it is
imperatively necessary to attempt it; and all this is done in an
uninhabited wilderness, or else a wilderness tenanted only by
unfriendly savages, where failure to get through means death by
disease and starvation. Wholesale disasters to South American
exploring parties have been frequent. The first recent effort to
descend one of the unknown rivers to the Amazon from the Brazilian
highlands resulted in such a disaster. It was undertaken in 1889 by a
party about as large as ours under a Brazilian engineer officer,
Colonel Telles Peres. In descending some rapids they lost everything--
canoes, food, medicine, implements--everything. Fever smote them, and
then starvation. All of them died except one officer and two men, who
were rescued months later. Recently, in Guiana, a wilderness veteran,
Andre, lost two-thirds of his party by starvation. Genuine wilderness
exploration is as dangerous as warfare. The conquest of wild nature
demands the utmost vigor, hardihood, and daring, and takes from the
conquerors a heavy toll of life and health.

Lyra, Kermit, and Cherrie, with four of the men, worked the canoes
half-way down the canyon. Again and again it was touch and go whether
they could get by a given point. At one spot the channel of the
furious torrent was only fifteen yards across. One canoe was lost, so
that of the seven with which we ha