第161章

The summer season was now breaking up; the river was rising; the sky was almost constantly clouded, and we had frequent rains.The mosquitoes also, which we had not felt while encamped on the sand-banks, now became troublesome.We paddled up the north-westerly channel, and arrived at a point near the upper end of Catua at ten o'clock p.m.There was here a very broad beach of untrodden white sand, which extended quite into the forest, where it formed rounded hills and hollows like sand dunes, covered with a peculiar vegetation: harsh, reedy grasses, and low trees matted together with lianas, and varied with dwarf spiny palms of the genus Bactris.We encamped for the night on the sands, finding the place luckily free from mosquitoes.The different portions of the party made arched coverings with the toldos or maranta-leaf awnings of their canoes to sleep under, fixing the edges in the sand.No one, however, seemed inclined to go to sleep, so after supper we all sat or lay around the large fires and amused ourselves.We had the fiddler with us, and in the intervals between the wretched tunes which he played, the usual amusement of story-telling beguiled the time: tales of hair-breadth escapes from jaguar, alligator, and so forth.There were amongst us a father and son who had been the actors, the previous year, in an alligator adventure on the edge of the praia we had just left.

The son, while bathing, was seized by the thigh and carried under water-- a cry was raised, and the father, rushing down the bank, plunged after the rapacious beast, which was diving away with his victim.It seems almost incredible that a man could overtake and master the large cayman in his own element; but such was the case in this instance, for the animal was reached and forced to release his booty by the man's thrusting his thumb into his eye.

The lad showed us the marks of the alligator's teeth on his thigh.We sat up until past midnight listening to these stories and assisting the flow of talk by frequent potations of burnt rum.A large, shallow dish was filled with the liquor and fired;when it had burned for a few minutes, the flame was extinguished and each one helped himself by dipping a tea-cup into the vessel.

One by one the people dropped asleep, and then the quiet murmur of talk of the few who remained awake was interrupted by the roar of jaguars in the jungle about a furlong distant.There was not one only, but several of the animals.The older men showed considerable alarm and proceeded to light fresh fires around the outside of our encampment.I had read in books of travel of tigers coming to warm themselves by the fires of a bivouac, and thought my strong wish to witness the same sight would have been gratified tonight.I had not, however,such good fortune, although I was the last to go to sleep, and my bed was the bare sand under a little arched covering open at both ends.The jaguars, nevertheless, must have come very near during the night, for their fresh footmarks were numerous within a score yards of the place where we slept.In the morning I had a ramble along the borders of the jungle, and found the tracks very numerous and close together on the sandy soil.