ho had perished
therein; and many more had died whose bodies were never recovered; the
toll of human life had been heavy. Had we been still on an unknown
river, pioneering our own way, it would doubtless have taken us at
least a fortnight of labor and peril to pass. But it actually took
only a day and a half. All the channels were known, all the trails
cut. Senhor Caripe, a first-class waterman, cool, fearless, and brawny
as a bull, came with us as guide. Half a dozen times the loads were
taken out and carried down. At one cataract the canoes were themselves
dragged overland; elsewhere they were run down empty, shipping a good
deal of water. At the foot of the cataract, where we dragged the
canoes overland, we camped for the night. Here Kermit shot a big
cayman. Our camp was alongside the graves of three men who at this
point had perished in the swift water.

Senhor Caripe told us many strange adventures of rubber-workers he had
met or employed. One of his men, working on the Gy-Parana, got lost
and after twenty-eight days found himself on the Madeirainha, which he
thus discovered. He was in excellent health, for he had means to start
a fire, and he found abundance of Brazil-nuts and big land-tortoises.
Senhor Caripe said that the rubbermen now did not go above the ninth
degree, or thereabouts, on the upper Aripuanan proper, having found
the rubber poor on the reaches above. A year previously five
rubbermen, Mundurucu Indians, were working on the Corumba at about
that level. It is a difficult stream to ascend or descend. They made
excursions into the forest for days at a time after caoutchouc. On one
such trip, after fifteen days they, to their surprise, came out on the
Aripuanan. They returned and told their "patron" of their discovery;
and by his orders took their caoutchouc overland to the Aripuanan,
built a canoe, and ran down with their caoutchouc to Manaos. They had
now returned and were working on the upper Aripuanan. The Mundurucus
and Brazilians are always on the best terms, and the former are even
more inveterate enemies of the wild Indians than are the latter.

By mid-forenoon on April 26 we had passed the last dangerous rapids.
The paddles were plied with hearty good will, Cherrie and Kermit, as
usual, working like the camaradas, and the canoes went dancing down
the broad, rapid river. The equatorial forest crowded on either hand
to the water's edge; and, although the river was falling, it was still
so hig