, to
lead on those men with persuasion and kindness was an exhausting mental
effort for me. Once or twice the suggestion was made that if I did not
agree to go back the way we had come I might perhaps get killed and they
would return alone. When I enquired whether any of them could find their
way back alone, they said "no"; so I suggested that perhaps it would be
to their advantage to let me live. I might eventually see them out of
that difficulty.

In all my travels I have seldom come across men more helpless at finding
their way about, or realizing in which direction they had travelled.
Barring Alcides, none of them had any more idea whether we had travelled
south, north, east, or west of Goyaz, than the man in the moon. Naturally
I did not exert myself to enlighten them unduly, for there lay my great
and only hold over them. I had fully realized that I was travelling with
an itinerant lunatic asylum, and I treated my men accordingly. No matter
what they did or said, I always managed to have things my own way. Never
by violence, or by a persuasive flow of language--the means used by the
average mortal. No, indeed; but by mere gentleness and kindness; very
often by absolute silence. Few people realize the force of silence on
momentous occasions; but of course few people know how to remain silently
silent--if I may so express it--in moments when their life is seriously
at stake. Silence is indeed the greatest force a man can use, if he knows
how to use it. It is certainly invaluable in exploring, when naturally
one is not always thrown into contact with the best of people.

The animals strayed away during the night, and it took all the best part
of four hours to recover them in the morning. Instinct is a wonderful
thing. They had all travelled to a place where, over undulating country,
fairly open campos, slightly wooded with stunted trees, were to be found,
and where they could obtain something to eat. When we crossed those
campos after our departure from camp, foliated rock showed through the
surface soil in many spots, in strata either displaced and left
vertical--in many cases at an angle of 38 deg.--or in its original horizontal
plane. Elsewhere dips in all kinds of directions showed that there must
have been a good deal of commotion in that region when that part of the
country subsided and formed the basin we were then crossing. The typical
feature of all those undulations was their arched backs.

We were at a l