a
journey alone to the spot where the baggage and Antonio had been left,
hoping to find his companion dead and so rob him of the money which he
knew he had in his possession--the pay he had received from me.

Here is another charming incident. Nearly dead with fatigue, I lay
helpless in a hammock which the _seringueiro_ had hung for me. He and his
wife had gone out to look after their new plantation, and only my men
remained loafing about.

The river was some 60 m. from the hut, and one had to go down a steep
bank to reach the water. My throat was parched from the high fever, so I
called Antonio, who was near me, to give me a glass of water. Antonio
never budged, but called to white Filippe, some way off, to bring the
water. Filippe called to the man X, repeating my order to him. The man X
continued fishing without taking the slightest notice.

So that, exhausted as I was, I had to struggle down to the river myself,
as those men, for whom I had almost died, reciprocated my sacrifice in so
graceful a fashion.

I think that I might as well mention here a curious case of telepathy
which occurred during those terrible days of starvation.

Naturally, when one has before one the prospect of leaving this world at
any moment, and one is working under a severe mental strain, one
generally thinks deeply of one's beloved parents and relatives. Thus my
father, mother and sister were before me all the time in my imagination.
Sometimes when I was half-dazed I could see them so vividly that I could
almost believe they were so close that I could touch them. I never
thought that I should see them again, in reality, although I never
actually lost hope of doing so; but I was thinking incessantly of them,
and of the anxiety I was causing them, as I had had no possible way of
communicating with them for months and months.

There would be nothing extraordinary in that, but the amazing part of it
all was that my parents and my sister--who had no idea whatever that I
was exploring, as I always take the greatest care not to let them
know--actually during that time of starvation saw me in their imagination
lying unconscious in the forest, dying of hunger, swarming all over with
ants and surrounded by crocodiles.

When I reached Rio de Janeiro in April of the following year I found
there a number of letters which had been written to me by my parents and
my sister during the month of September, in which they told me of those
constant visio